Trowel Spin- August 2025

“That sounds like an oxymoron if there was one.”

Recently I received an email from my accountant that made me frown. And then it made me think.

We had just spent months preparing our year-end financials and taking them through the accountancy review process. There were numerous emails, wreaths of information, and meetings. Then one morning just before the tax deadline, I got the email. It gave me the low-down of our tax situation including the supporting details, in a few short succinct paragraphs.

While I wasn’t particularly impressed by what it said, it made logical sense. But here is the bigger question that was dogging my mind. How can something that is summarized so simply and sensibly in a single email be so terrifically complex to arrive at.

Some months ago, we were revamping our website and business software. I said something like this, “I just want a simple reporting tool. Something that looks nice and works well.”

This was the answer I was given, “Well, simple is actually hard.”

Simple is hard. That sounds like an oxymoron if there was one. But the more you think about it, the more you know it’s perfectly true.

We all know the feeling of being up against a giant ball of red tape, and wondering if it really needs to be so ridiculously complex. Or filling out an application that’s 15 pages long that asks for information about yourself that you didn’t even know existed. I remember after one of my daughters was born, I took her down to the hospital lab for bloodwork. They asked me if she still has the same address.  I mean, how many addresses are typical for a 2-day old baby?

Creating complexity is easy, mostly because you don’t have to. It is default. It happens by itself. It even feeds on itself. The sole purpose of bureaucracy seems to be to create more bureaucracy. It’s like rolling a giant snowball up a hill. It gets bigger and bigger until you can’t push it anymore. Then it rolls back on top of you and crushes you. That’s bureaucracy in a nutshell, (or a snowball rather).

There are two ways of inducing complexity. Either by adding too many rules or taking too many away.  Often, we add technology to make life easier but end up complicating it more. Other times we throw out systems, only to find we can’t function without one. Like the saying goes, keep it simple, but no simpler. 

Henry David Thoreau wrote a book entitled Walden. In it he touts simplicity, and the idea of cutting away all the excesses that complicate life. His capturing call is, “Simplify! Simplify!”  Ralph Waldo Emerson responded by grumbling that one “Simplify” would have sufficed.

We are held hostage by complexity. But here is the ugly truth. It is our very being that first complicates matters. Everything external could be perfect but we would still complicate things. Because our souls are chronically ill. People do wrong. It’s a universal failure of trust that creates every complexity we hate so much.

Simplicity is transcendent. To create simplicity in our companies is a high and important responsibility. But the path to attain it starts deep inside each of us.

And that’s why it is so hard.