I am naturally drawn towards simplicity.

It attracts me because I can keep simple systems in my head to be confident about how they work. Because less simplicity hinders their ability to evolve, to adapt, to change. Because complexity is costly, slow, and it decreases our options.

In the context of evolution stages, the closer we are to genesis, the more important simplicity is.

At genesis, the world and our product market fit are uncertain. Everything is novel. We want to be able to quickly pivot our direction when we find our hypotheses falsified or we spot a competitive advantage. Simplicity fuels all that, allowing us to focus on what matters instead of being bogged down. It is harder for legacy to hold us back, when we keep things simple.

As we evolve through custom-built stages and later into products, the inherent complexity of the world or our business will catch up with us. More adoption will require us (to consider) handling more edge cases, serving more personas, and scaling what we do. By then, we’ll have to give away some simplicity. But only as little as possible.

# In practice

This shows up all around us, we just need to look for it.

Recently, a young organization that I am close to had to organize a conference-like event. They had to collect abstracts for talks, establish a website for the event, and had no previous experience doing any of this. They expected hundreds of participants to submit their abstracts and had heard that manually organizing them would be painful. So they opted for letting users submit abstracts through a Wordpress form.

But right then, Wordpress itself introduced artificial complexity and became a limitation to their ability to experiment with other tools or ways to build a website, for instance through easier or more friendly frontends.

Allowing users to submit abstracts through emails, instead, would have been a simpler choice. It would have maintained open their options for a website and allowed them to delay complexity until later, when sorting the abstracts. Something in which they had far more experience, was less uncertain in its execution, and would easily scale to the number of organizers involved. Plus, it would have allowed them not to optimise on their expectation of hundreds of abstracts submitted, but react to it in case the numbers were in fact significant.