Analyse and Simplify

Roger Martin

People who make it their business to study large-scale problems — business theorists and economists among them — seem to be in broad agreement that the world is growing ever more complex — and that this trend makes their work harder. But is it true?… Most of the guns deployed in modern knowledge advancement are aimed at narrow problems for which the causeand-effect relationship is specified with the famous “all other things being equal” proviso.

Each narrow knowledge domain develops analytical tool-sets that deepen the narrow knowledge domain. Each narrow domain develops ever more algorithmic knowledge, and those developing the knowledge are extremely confident that they are right because they are so specialised within their own domain. This approach has created another kind of complexity: inter-domain complexity… This is, I believe, what makes it feel that complexity has increased.

I absolutely do not believe that the subtlety between cause and effect has increased at all in the world. But the negative manifestations of the largely unaddressed inter-domain complexity make it feel like we have massive un-addressable complexity overwhelming us. In other words, we are bedevilled by manufactured complexity — complexity that could have been avoided but has instead been amplified by the pursuit of narrow knowledge in a broad world.



From “Our Self-Inflicted Complexity”