The sentence „it is not that simple“ costs nothing. That is why it gets said so often.
Yesterday I sat with a friend and we traded problems, the way friends do at our age. Somewhere in the second hour I heard myself say a sentence. Simple minds try to appear complex. Complex minds do their best to appear simple.
It sounded good, good enough that I wrote it down afterwards. The next morning it looked different. The sentence flatters whoever says it. Everyone who uses it puts himself on the right side, and I had just done exactly that. So I dropped the sentence and kept the question under it. Why is complexity so comfortable?
Because the person who says „it is complex“ never has to do anything.
You can watch it in any meeting. Someone says: it is not that simple. The room nods, the person is now deep. Someone else says: this is simple, we just do X. The room goes quiet, the person is now naive. Both sentences cost nothing to say. Only one of them commits you to something. The second person has a task on Monday. The first one has a reputation. We reward the sentence that commits to nothing, and we call the people who say it understanders. Some of them are. Many are blockers with better vocabulary.
Complexity looks like sophistication. Most of the time it is insurance. A review round, a committee, a new checkbox: each one spreads the responsibility so thin that nobody has to carry it. We did not become failure-friendly. We became failure-tolerant. We can live with a broken thing forever, as long as nobody has to own the fix.
Two examples from my own experience at certain brands.
A customer types „jacket“ into our search and gets forty jackets. The one with the best price is not among them, because it is last season’s, and last season lives in a tab called Outlet. Nobody searches for „outlet jacket“. That tab was not built for the customer. It was built for us: so the new collection looks new, so the margin story stays clean, so nobody has to explain why a reduced jacket sits next to a full-price one. The customer paid for our peace with a worse result. The simple version is one sentence: a jacket is a jacket, show it where jackets are, with its new price.
Say that sentence in a merchandising meeting and watch the room. It is not that simple.
A company I worked with graded every feature by complexity, and the process grew with the grade. A small change needed a form. A big one needed a business case, a review round and a signature from the C-level. Reasonable on paper. In practice the ideas that mattered hit the heaviest gate, and within a year nobody submitted anything ambitious. The process worked perfectly. It just processed nothing. The gate should not grow with how big the idea is. It should grow with how little the person brings. No solution and no numbers: heavy gate. Solution and numbers on the table: open door.
Which is my own complexity, and I know it. I ask for two things, and both make the week harder. Bring a solution, not just a problem. Putting a problem on the table and walking away is not a contribution, it is a delegation. And know the numbers and argue with them. So what separates my complexity from the alibi kind? One test, and I use it on myself first. Does this complexity change the outcome, or does it change who has to do something afterwards?
So here is the version of the sentence I can stand behind.
Simple is the expensive version. It costs work: complicated is the raw state of every idea, simple is the edited one, and the editing is time the sender spends so the receiver does not have to. It costs courage: if you speak simply you can be wrong in public, if you speak in complexity you have already been excused. And it costs respect: three sentences someone can act on take him more seriously than three pages meant to impress him.
The next time someone in your meeting says „this is simple“, do not treat him as naive. He just did the one thing nobody else in the room was willing to do. He made himself measurable.
In 2019 I wrote that the act of failing deserves the same tribute as the act of teaching someone. Add one line. The act of saying „this is simple“ deserves it too. It is the only sentence in the room that can be proven wrong by Friday.