Enter: Simple vs. Naive

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The same can be said about simplicity, which is why we instinctively simplify by removing. There is little to be gained by adding to something complex, or so it seems.

If you have a 25-page report that you want simplified to a 2-page document, you may either get a simplification, or important omissions. Although the report is “simplified,” your life of trying to run a project with incomplete information won’t be. The simplest answer might be absorbing all the details in the 25-page report instead of making excuses.

For example, in a project that I worked on, the UX designer decided that the medical software’s screen was too cluttered. After he fixed it, the doctors were not pleased, because they now required four clicks instead of one to get the necessary details. What was clutter to the UX designer was useful design for the doctors, who preferred consuming dense information. Instead of simplicity, we had delivered naivety.

The path to simplicity is adding to the solution rather than naively removing from the problem.

It’s also possible to worsen any situation by eliminating the wrong thing. For example, it’s lethal to focus only on “things that matter today” and ignore strategy. Having a strategy early, however thin, and then using it to guide day-to-day activities makes life simpler in exchange for more upfront thinking. The naïve solution, which is reactively focusing only on the day-to-day activities, makes hope your only chance of arriving at your destination.

In the examples above, we see that the right solution is often adding to one’s knowledge, rather than trivializing the problem. The path to simplicity is adding to the solution rather than naively removing from the problem.

And that’s exactly the path we’ll explore in the entirety of Simple vs. Naive.