Don’t Distrust The Simple Approach

Phew, it's been a while. Summer, start of school, travels. Anyway.

I've recently come across multiple situations where simple is best, but gets overlooked in favour of something complex:

• I've had discussions about diet and exercise. Simple (eat less, move more) is best, but people don't trust it, so they have a 12-step exercise routine and a complicated schedule of exactly which food group is verboten at what time of day.

• I've had finance folks reach out about investing. Simple (index funds matched to your risk tolerance) is best. Still, people don't trust it, so they want a complicated, actively managed portfolio that gets adjusted every time the US president sends a tweet.

• I've chatted about strategy and consulting with a friend. For exploratory work and new initiatives, the best approach is to just start and iterate on the feedback. But, of course, that just seems too simple, so instead we ask a big consulting company to make a deck with 60 slides, complete with SWOT analysis, 2x2 matrices, stakeholder personas, ROI projections, a RACI chart, a change management framework, risk register, industry benchmarking, and an executive summary that uses 'synergy' unironically.

We're all smart people here, so we have domain experience that's genuinely complex. That can bias us to distrust simple solutions. What we should adopt is a mindset that distrusts complexity and isn't ashamed to select and defend the simple approach.