The Laws of Simplicity: Another Way to Face Complexity

Most of the time, we’re helpless in the face of ever‑increasing complexity. The “increase of entropy” is, on the whole, an irreversible natural process: making things messier is always easier than making them more orderly. But locally, we can still maintain simplicity and order—or at least try not to let complexity grow too quickly. The book The Laws of Simplicity describes how complexity grows and spreads, and on that basis proposes key principles and ways of thinking about simplification. It focuses primarily on business models and behaviors. One core proposition, never explicitly stated but always implied, is: “By reducing complexity, we improve user experience, which in turn leads to commercial success.”

The explosion of complexity largely stems from organizations and cultures. As organizations expand and more middle-management layers are added, powers and functions rarely undergo major reform. As a result, most work ends up being revisions, additions, and compromises. This is one key reason organizational complexity skyrockets. No one wants to say “no” and remove unreasonable parts of the system; everyone just patches things up, adds extra functions, and muddles through.

Human organizations are like this, and many other domains are similar. Anders Hejlsberg, the inventor of C#, once mentioned that at a C++ developer conference he heard, “We’ve added 79 new features to C++ this time.” Most of those features were unfamiliar to him and unlikely to be used. At that moment he felt C++ had become bloated, and that it was time to create a new language. What Hejlsberg did not anticipate, however, was that although C# was relatively new, Microsoft’s repeated updates were already making it more and more complex. So, can inventing yet another language solve this problem? I suspect that before we find a powerful way to deal with complexity itself, no language can escape this fate.

Another reason is that the larger an organization becomes, the more it fears loss. A mindset of constant anxiety over gains and losses takes hold, management costs soar, and the endless stream of laws, procedures, documents, and so on—originally meant to regulate behavior and processes—grows ever more complicated. In the end, no one knows what to do. Aside from a website’s lawyers (and some sites may simply copy others), almost no one reads the increasingly long legal statements when registering an account. No one can carefully study all the clauses in insurance and credit card contracts, nor can anyone remember whether the employee handbook contains “68” or “168” rules and codes of conduct. As the author writes in the book, when ordinary people face these terms, what they feel is not a fair agreement, but: “We are a proper, large‑scale organization. You are just a weak, helpless individual. Don’t even think about fighting us.”

Indeed, beyond objective causes, making things complicated often serves to exploit information asymmetry for profit. Because ordinary users cannot untangle seemingly complex processes and documents, banks, insurance companies, home renovation firms, and all kinds of organizations can profit from that opacity.

Abraham Lincoln said: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” In an age of increasing information transparency, business models that rely on complexity and information asymmetry are bound to decline. In contrast, simplicity and clarity—those models that deliver a better user experience—will ultimately prevail. Using Apple and Google as examples, the book presents best practices for simplification across products, manuals, websites, and other touchpoints. It also proposes three key elements of simplification: empathy, clarity, and minimalism, each of which is carefully analyzed and explained.

In today’s age of exploding complexity, The Laws of Simplicity goes against the current by advocating business models that improve user experience through simplification, and by offering concrete methods for putting this into practice. It is highly suitable for organizations that aspire to stand out amid fierce market competition to explore and apply.