Simplicity in a complex world - what does it mean?

[Paul Z Jackson]

A post on the Art of Hosting list asked, ‘What if the art of hosting and harvesting is how to be with complexity in a simple way?’ – which rang a bell!

As you may have been vaguely aware, our strapline at The Solutions Focus is ‘Simplicity in a Complex World’. (Does anyone take any notice of straplines or are they simply a way to keep brand gurus employed?)

Anyway, we were discussing the choice of straplines in a workshop at the weekend, recalling how simplicity is important so we can be as clear as possible about things, make minimal assumptions, follow the philosophical principle of Occam’s Razor and resist the urge to make things more complicated than need be.

And recognition that the world is complex – in the technical sense of there being many complex adaptive systems, which are best understood by descriptions of chaos, mathematical complexity and so on, so we resist the over-simplification of cause and effect explanations when they are inappropriate.

We reckon that a solutions-focused approach offer prospects of making progress in a world understood and described in that way, by proposing methods that clarify what everyone involved might want, and allowing small experimental steps to test for progress towards that.