Reaction and Anticipation–Choosing Simplicity Over Complexity

It’s not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it. - Hans Selye

I believe that people make their own luck by great preparation and good strategy. - Jack Canfield

Some years ago when car bumpers were still metal, my uncle’s car engine had died and he needed a “boost” to restart the engine. When he and my father discovered that they had only one wire available instead of the typical two required to boost a vehicle, their initial thought was that boosting the engine was impossible.  My father came up with the idea of pushing the two cars together until their bumpers touched, connecting the one wire they had between the positive leads on the batteries of the two cars and relying on the hope that the cars were both grounded through their chassis (and bumpers). The idea was that this would allow them to coax the dead car battery back to Life.

They were right and my uncle was able to return home without further incident.

Some years before that, my father’s father was asked by a local merchant to build a chimney.  The merchant in question had a reputation for not paying for work delivered and despite the pleas of many of my grandfather’s friends to not perform the work for fear of being taken advantage of, my grandfather built the chimney anyway.

Upon completion of the chimney, the merchant hemmed and hawed about paying for it as he looked for things to point out that he wasn’t happy with.  He then proceeded to light a fire in the fireplace and was startled when smoke from the fire came back into his house instead of being carried up the chimney.  Looking up the chimney, he saw no obvious issues and went to my grandfather to express his dissatisfaction.

My grandfather indicated that if he was paid for the work he had performed, he would fix the chimney immediately and the merchant grudgingly complied with the request.  Upon accepting the money, my grandfather climbed up onto the roof with a large, flat beach rock in his hand.  Centering the rock over the top of the chimney, he released it and as it fell through the chimney, it smashed the thin pane of glass that my grandfather had intentionally placed across the chimney about halfway down when he had built it.

Both stories remind me of the beauty of simplicity in either solving a problem spontaneously or anticipating a simple solution to a problem perceived to be difficult by others.

The Bottom Line

We live in a world that seems to be filled with complexity and as a result, we either respond to problems with the assumption that such problems always require complex solutions or we go through Life ignoring the importance of being prepared for problems by having simple solutions at hand.

The belief that every problem requires a complex solution or that the anticipation of a problem forces us to avoid preparation because we don’t want to be bothered with embracing additional complexity in fact creates the very complexity that we are attempting to avoid.

As a long-time Wall St / Fortune 25 strategy and large-scale technology architect guy, I can state with certainty that even the most complex of things are nothing more than a combination of many simple things which can be more easily resolved on their individual merit.

The question around simplicity versus complexity becomes:

Why would we willingly embrace complexity in our Lives when better Paths to simplicity exist and why would we allow others to create complexity for us or convince us that complexity is necessary?

Each of us has an answer to this question.

Hopefully it is not more complicated than it needs to be.

How would you answer the question?

Are you sure?

How do you know?

In service and servanthood,

Harry

PS For many of my clients, I recommend the process of backcasting to translate complex intentions into simple solutions.  An example of how backcasting is used can be found here and here.

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Problem Solving: Over Complicating Simplicity

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. - Leonardo da Vinci

Simplicity is the glory of expression. - Walt Whitman

In mulling over a challenging problem the other day, my mind replayed an event that I experienced a few years ago that made me realize that I had been exploring the problem incorrectly.

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One beautiful mid-summer’s evening, I found myself on a wide, slow moving river, accompanied only by the evening song of birds and the whistle of my fly rod.  As I made my last cast for the evening, I was at one with nature when suddenly I felt a strike on my fishing fly.

It was big, perhaps the largest thing I had ever hooked and when I felt the weight of it bend my fly rod, I knew that if I didn’t play it carefully, I was bound to lose what was no doubt the greatest fish I had ever landed.

Well, I thought it was a fish but in the waning light of the evening, I suddenly realized that what was moving towards me on top of the water wasn’t the fish of my dreams but was in fact a muskrat entangled in my fishing line.

As it came ashore, I was perplexed with the conundrum in front of me.  Had I hurt the animal?  How could I get it free?  Was there a game warden handy or some other person with knowledge of how to deal with such situations?  How would I retrieve a fishing fly that I had used for years and which was one of my favourites?  Should I just cut the line and let it go (probably the worst idea because of the threat of line entanglement for the animal)?

As I stood there frantically wondering what I should do, two hikers came along and after one of them noted the obvious (that I appeared to have caught a muskrat on a fishing fly), we all stood there discussing a myriad of potential solutions.

Three representatives of the allegedly most advanced species on Earth stood on the riverbank thinking through the problem that grew with ever increasing complexity and urgency when I noticed that the muskrat had been working on its own solution.  It had been hooking at the fly with its paw and suddenly it released itself from my tackle.  Trotting to the water, it slid into the water quietly and swam off into the sunset.

The three of us looked at each other in silence before laughing that the small animal, once left to its own devices, had found its own solution despite our best efforts to complicate the situation.

We were so busy thinking through a complex solution that we had failed to recognize that simple solutions were within our reach … if we were willing to allow ourselves to see them or allow them to unfold.

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As my thoughts returned to the problem at hand, I realized that we had taken a problem that had been made overly complex with too many theories and idea exchanges.  In fact, the solution at the core of the difficulty was simple and relatively painless if enacted quickly and with courage.

Those of us exploring the problem, being complex individuals, had happily pursued a different path, seeking a complex solution that to us was necessary for an obviously complex problem.

And once a lot of people saw complexity in the simplicity before us, we ended up moving towards the picture below instead of moving towards a solution.

With the realization that we had gone down the wrong path, a simpler solution was obtained and a lot of painful “spinning” was avoided.

The Bottom Line

It is true that there are many complex problems in the world that have complex solutions (if they have solutions at all).

Fortunately or unfortunately for us, many of the challenges that we deal with are in fact not as complex as we imagine and with that understanding, we need to be cognizant of these ideas expressed by two brilliant men:

Every problem has in it the seeds of its own solution. If you don't have any problems, you don't get any seeds. - Norman Vincent Peale

The Five Minute Rule: Clients always know how to solve their problems, and always tell you the solution in the first five minutes. – Gerald Weinberg

Our personal and professional lives are filled with unlimited positive potential that is interspersed with difficulties and challenges.

When we are confronted with a challenge, we should not automatically assume that because it looks complex, it must therefore be complex.  In order to understand what is before us before we “dive in”, we should pause, breathe and then ask ourselves two questions:

1. Why do we believe this to be a complex problem?
2. How do we know?

You may be surprised what the answers tell you about what lays before you.

In service and servanthood,

Harry

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Addendum – Understanding Cause and Effect – May 22, 2014

Part of the difficulty with creating complexity from simplicity is that many people fail to apply the time, energy or money necessary to understand the difference between cause and effect.

For example, I was reading a report this morning about a number of organizations that are struggling to understand how to reduce the level of employee absenteeism.  They were tackling the problem by tightening up the process of needing a doctor’s note, changing how much time people get for “sick time”, changing how people get paid for short and long term absenteeism, etc.

However, in all of the discussions around these types of things, I noticed that the report authors never asked a simple question:

Why are the employees absent in the first place?

In a different example, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador have struggled for years with outmigration, the notion that many families are leaving the province in droves.  The Government has spent millions of dollars tackling the “problem” of outmigration by running advertising campaigns to encourage people to stay when they fail to recognize that outmigration is a symptom of a larger problem, that being a lack of good paying jobs, a strong education system and a robust healthcare system.

I wonder if it comes down a “feel good” thing, being able to show people that something is being done when the lack of time, energy, money, knowledge or competence actually prevents a real solution from being created.

What do you think?

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Beauty in Simplicity

It is hard to deny that we live in a world of ever-increasing challenge.

Global financial pressures, the human race’s need to have a certain number of wars going on at any given point, the number of people who go hungry in an empowered society, corruption and waste in government, churches and charities designed to serve others and a plethora of other things can sometimes make it difficult to see the positive side of humanity.

Even when faced with challenges like global climate change, we often prefer to insult and fight each other rather than to come together to collect real data and to solve any issues that exist.

President Ronald Reagan had this interesting quote when addressing the UN General Assembly many years ago:

Perhaps we need some outside universal threat.  I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.

Some days, I’m not sure that the arrival of aliens would be enough.

In a world where the media would rather fill our head with gloom and doom instead of a blend of reality AND optimism, it can be difficult to wonder where we are headed.

In the complex world of strategy and global technology architecture that I live in, I often see people who prefer to fill their world with complexity, either to hide something (including their own incompetence), to pretend to be something that they are not or simply because they have the misunderstanding that everything is a complex problem that requires a complex solution.

And then there are some who believe that the existence of complexity can be used to justify their existence, which is why some people feel threatened when people like me bring an approach that simplifies the complex wherever possible.

It is because of this plethora of complexity (most of it being unnecessary) that I appreciate and savor the beauty that comes with simplicity.

Especially from sources that are unexpected

One of the few television programs I watch is America’s Got Talent.  My reasons are many as I explain in an earlier blog “Putting It All On the Line”.

Last night I was startled by a simple but powerful performance by Joe Castillo who blends art, light and music to tell compelling stories.

How inspiring can someone be who has never outgrown the childhood love of playing in the sand?

Take a look for yourself.

Joe Castillo–America’s Got Talent

 

For those of you who celebrate a strong faith, here is another example of his work:

Joe Castillo–The Passion

 

And finally, one that touched my heart deeply as I think about the friends I lost in 9/11.  Warning – this may be difficult for some people to watch.

Joe Castillo–Never Forget–The 9/11 Story

 

I know many people who, in striving to find their life purpose, solutions to life problems or solutions to problems in general, seek out the most complex solutions.

Because they require complex solutions to often simple problems, they spend an inordinate amount of time creating these solutions.  Sometimes the solution is so complex, they never actually finish defining or creating it and give up in exhaustion (or in the case of many government and business projects, when they have run out of money).

Oftentimes the answers to many questions in our personal world, our professional lives and in Life in general actually lay in the simplest of things.

But in order to see those solutions, we must be willing to open our eyes, our mind and our heart to the simplicity that exists in a world of complexity.

We need to ignore the insistence of others that there must be a complex answer.

After all, it’s ok to put up our hand once in a while and demand silence as we seek answers.

When we do this, we are invited to see things in a different way.

As Joe Castillo invites us with a little sand, a little music and a little light.

In service and servanthood,

Harry