Keep it simple.

We grow up being told that, don’t we? Or rather, Keep It Simple, Stupid, so it has a funny and memorable acronym, KISS. And as a society, we certainly do seem to prefer that, don’t we? Keep the solutions simple. Make it easy to understand. Tiktok and sound bites and break your ideas into bullet points so you can thread them together on X.

To be fair, I’m not on X anymore.

What does this have to do with writing?

Nothing. Everything.

When I was first learning how to be a project manager, I was introduced to two individuals who would change my life. (Not personally introduced, you understand, but introduced to their work.) One was a statistician, mathematician, and engineer and the other one was a banker. I speak of W. Edwards Deming, whose management and quality control techniques helped shape the Japanese automotive boom, and Dee Hock, the founder of VISA.

I don’t know if they ever met each other. I rather suspect they wouldn’t have gotten along. While both were obsessed with systems and management, they were also the diametrically opposed business gods of order and chaos. On the surface, many of the things Hock railed against were the same things Deming spent his life trying to achieve. Deming, ever humble, called his principles “The System of Profound Knowledge” while Hock referred to his theory as “Chaordic Organization,” and claimed to be inspired by chaos theory. Deming comes off as a math nerd turned crotchety business-consultant Bob, constantly chiding the Lundbergs of the world. Hock sometimes makes me wonder just how good the mushrooms he was smoking must have been.

Deming was very manufacturing focused. Hock was the sort of anti-capitalist progressive you would never in a million years suspect could end up creating the modern credit system. (To be fair, he wasn’t so liberal at the start, but I strongly suspect his experiences with VISA radicalized him.)

Many of their principles and philosophies are exactly the same.

(They both died–Hock only a few years ago—at the age of 93. Which I think Deming would’ve have found hilarious, mostly because of its statistical insignificance.)

I’m not really getting to the point, am I? Apologies. I’m working through this as I type. I think the point is this: our obsession with simple solutions and quick fixes is going to be our destruction unless we do something about it. Fast.

That’s not hyperbole. I wish I were exaggerating. The problems we face are not simple. They are complicated and interconnected and far-reaching, with unintended, unknowable consequences. There are no simple answers. None. Be suspicious of anyone who tells you otherwise.

As a famous pirate once said, they are trying to sell you something.

Both men foresaw these issues and grappled with the curse of being prophets all their lives. Hock spoke of the problem as part of our dependence with hierarchy and control; Deming talked of our obsession with short-term gain. In both cases, they described how a fundamental unwillingness to allow people to have agency and self-direction, of prioritizing quarterly reports and profits over human lives, ethics, quality, and pride of work, was destroying the modern world, and the USA in particular. Hard to argue with that, given current events.

Executives were nothing special, both men said. In fact, executives were always the problem. It was only when they got out of the way and let their employees tackle the challenges that anything real was accomplished. (I am 100% certain that if anyone had ever given Deming a time machine, he might not have gone for the whole “kill Hitler early” idea, but he absolutely would’ve tried to stop the creation of the East India Company. )

Nobody listens to Cassandra though, do they? Not even when the CEOs of major corporations were paying Deming a nice consultancy salary to wag fingers in their faces.

Treat people with dignity, as though they possess inherent worth, and give them some control over how they do their job and, apparently, they do a better job. Who would’ve guessed?

His message was simple, wasn’t it? Hock’s too. But really, this is simple only in the sense that quarks are simple. In practice, these ideas are endlessly complex, relying as they do on human unquantifiables that cannot be measured on a Gantt chart or bottom line: on loyalty, ingenuity, inspiration, trust. That last bit, the trust? That specifically refers to management delegating authority. And nobody wants to do that. That’s terrifying. Believe me, nothing scares a corporate executive as much as the idea of giving up control—even if giving their employees autonomy and purpose means the company will make more money. After all, why is the executive being paid the big bucks if the employees don’t really need them to stand around barking out orders?

Yeah. That is a good question, isn’t it?

The gut-clenching need of those in power to keep that power is hardly confined to corporations, though. It infects every layer of our politics (everyone’s politic—I’m not just talking about the USA here), religions, and social structures. Blame it on our tribal natures, the need to support our team and tear down theirs, the comfort of following a leader or the thrill of being that leader. We are obsessed with hierarchies. Being on top. Climbing there.

Or at least being higher up than that other guy.

There’s nothing wrong with needing a leader, mind you. Some people do it really well, to the betterment of everyone around them. I’ve known people who couldn’t be anything but a leader no matter how hard they tried—not because they were power hungry but because they were so brilliant, so inspirational. But leadership ability —the sort that brings out the best in people instead of the worst— isn’t something you can check off on a resume with a “simple” metric like a title or a college degree.

So companies opt for the simpler method, the one that can be tracked. Everyone opts for the simpler method, the easier method, the one that absolves us of blame and responsibility. It’s not even necessarily the worst method, except for how it usually is.

What does any of this have to do with being a writer?

Nothing. Everything.

I know I’m rambling here, and I apologize for that, but this has been on my mind a lot of late. Unintended consequences and how small changes snowball into large avalanches. The connections between it all. Writing, like anything else, is shaped by the choices we make—whether to take the easier path or the one that demands more effort, more uncertainty, more risk. The simplest method might get words on the page, might even sell books, but does it tell the truth in the way only we can?

We’re told to keep it simple, but I really don’t think that’s good advice. It’s not our job to keep it simple. It’s not what drives us forward.

We are trying to make the complicated seem simple, itself an incredibly complicated idea. To make the complicated comprehensible, understandable, whether that complicated idea is love or honor or what it means when we need other people to slay our dragons for us.

I wonder if we haven’t been doing the job too well.

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