Complexity is not a four-letter word.

As cognitive scientist and design guru Donald Norman says, living in today’s world means dealing with activities, systems, and tools that are necessarily complex.

He opens Living with Complexity [1] with the example of an airplane cockpit. To someone who’s not an aviation engineer or a pilot, the rows and rows of dials, switches, and screens are dizzying. But that doesn’t mean they’re badly designed.

Norman explains:

The airplane cockpit is not complex because the engineers and designers took some perverse pleasure in making it that way. No: it is complex because all that stuff is required to control the plane safely, navigate the airline routes with accuracy, keep to the schedule while making it comfortable for the passengers, and be able to cope with whatever mishap might occur en route.

For the typical airplane passenger, a simpler instrument panel might be less overwhelming and more aesthetically pleasing, but it would also put their comfort and safety at risk.

When we insist on simplifying the communication products we use to share complex ideas (writing, presentations, graphic, videos, and so on), we also run serious risks.

When we start to worship at the shrine of simplicity-for-simplicity’s sake, we jeopardize our ability to communicate nuanced meaning, forge human connections, and reflect critically on the state of our complex world.

If you’re engaged in sharing research knowledge with non-expert audiences, then you’re familiar with what Norman calls “the cry for simplicity.” You’ve felt the pressure to “dumb down” sophisticated concepts to a Grade 3 level or to package a revolutionary thesis into a five-word slogan.

I know what that kind of stress feels like: I once walked away from a lucrative contract because I was asked to reduce scholarly research to “slogans and soundbites.” I also know that caving in to the demand for lowest-denominator thinking isn’t the only option.

As Norman maintains, we can use thoughtful design to help non-expert audiences navigate and engage with complexity. As deep thinkers, we can empower others to think deeply by giving them tools that are up to the job, communication products that are both accessible and serviceable.

The opposite of “complex” is not “TLDR”

In the current climate of anti-intellectualism, the adjective “complex” has taken on a negative moral tone. Complexity, so popular opinion would have it, has become a crime because it imposes an unfair burden on the uninitiated, exacerbating the gap between experts and nonexperts.

Yet as Norman points out, the opposite of “complex” is not “simple.” Complexity is not in itself the problem. The problem is confusion, and that happens when tools for handling complex situations are poorly designed:

Forget the complaints against complexity; instead, complain about confusion. We should complain about anything that makes us feel helpless, powerless in the face of mysterious forces that take away control and understanding.

If you’re an expert who wants to share complex ideas outside your zone of expertise, your mission shouldn’t be to create a four-bullet “TLDR” (too long; didn’t read) summary. Your mandate is to combat confusion.

Resist the pressure to turn your weighty ideas into empty fluff. That’s not a real solution to the problem of nonunderstanding. Instead, communicate in ways that give nonexperts what both confusion and oversimplification rob them of, “control and understanding.”

Three ways to fight the decline toward meaninglessness

Conscious communication design enables learning. It meets the audience where they are, but unlike simplified communication, it doesn’t leave them there.

When you craft a communication with learning in mind, you invite your audience to join you on a journey of meaning-making. You entice them to grapple with ideas that might require them to stretch outside their cognitive comfort zone. You help them connect, compare, and make sense of new bits of knowledge and fit those bits into their existing worldview.

You can’t do this with just a few bullet points or a slimmed-down, jazzed-up graph that distorts your data. In fact, some of the moves that facilitate learning contradict popular advice, which tends to make a virtue of brevity to the point of minimalism.

Shorter, however, is not always better, just as a so-called “simple solution” may fail to resolve a complex situation.

Here are three practices that resist the current trend toward oversimplifying research-based communication and will transform a skeptical audience into allies:

1. Bring back the paragraph. Bulleted lists serve a useful purpose. They stand out visually on a page or screen and make it easy for the audience to quickly skim through a list of examples, related items, parts of a system, or steps in a process.
   
   But bulleted lists are NOT your best choice when you need to guide the audience through the development of an idea. A bulleted list is a sequential, not hierarchical structure, so it can’t help an audience understand relationships among ideas.
   
   The genius of the paragraph is that it provides an adaptable unit of meaning that allows us to group ideas in ways that promote learning and understanding. By establishing one main idea, it gives us the flexibility to evolve that idea by adding to it, contrasting it with other ideas, supporting it through examples, and so on.
   
   When you remove the structure of the paragraph, you take away important cues that help the audience quickly comprehend and evaluate your ideas. That’s why, when I see a bulleted list like this one, from a best-selling book on business communication, [2] I want to shudder:
   
   
   It does not matter if you work at Apple, a small business or a new start-up, it has never been harder to get people focused on what matters most.

• The work-from-anywhere reality of a world changed by COVID-19 has turned communications into a profound and critical weakness for every company, every leader, every rising star, every restless worker.
  
  
• This problem will echo loudly through every organization because a vibrant culture, a clear strategy and swift execution rely on strong communications in a scattered world.
  
  
• Stewart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack, told us that, in a hypothetical 10,000-employee company that spends $1 billion on payroll, 50 to 60 percent of the average employee’s time is spent on communication of some sort. Yet no one provides the tools and training to do this well.
  
  
  On an emotional level, the list structure works: one by one, the bulleted items drill into the reader fear and anxiety about living in a “scattered world” where communication has become a “critical weakness” associated with stress and financial vulnerability.
  
  Rationally, though, it’s hard to make sense of the salvo of disconnected assertions. What is the main idea we’re meant to take from the litany of laments about the ineffectiveness of communication in a post-COVID world other than that this ineffectiveness is a problem?
  
  In a world of soundbites, firing off bullets in scattershot mode may catch the audience’s attention, and it may convey the contours of vague ideas. But it won’t enable them to grasp and grapple with complex ideas because meaning-making happens when we understand ideas in relation to one another.

2. Hold opposite-but-true ideas in tension. Critical thinkers understand that it’s possible for two ideas to be true and yet contradictory. To judge the merit of each idea, you must be able to view it dispassionately rather than succumbing to a knee-jerk reaction.
   
   Such rational disinterest doesn’t play out well in today’s media, which prefers catch phrases that stir up strong positive or negative feelings. Antagonism gets better ratings than impartial assessment.
   
   To educate nonexperts in complex ideas, however, you must show them how to handle this delicate balancing act of acknowledging the truth in apparent opposites. You must help them out of the popular trap of “us versus them,” or “this versus that,” thinking.
   
   I recently heard a troubling example of the tendency to entertain just one idea at a time in a CBC conversation about Mark Carney’s attitude to the US. A commentator complained that he was experiencing “whiplash” over Carney’s apparent about-face in recent days.
   
   First, the commentator said, Carney had positioned himself as anti-Trump. He’d said that Trump’s actions and words had threatened our national sovereignty and ended the existing relationship between Canada and the US.
   
   Then, the commentator claimed, Carney had pulled a sudden 360-degree turn by engaging in a conversation that both Carney and Trump said they found productive.
   
   How, the pundit pondered, could Carney be so inconsistent? What was one to make of a leader who seemed so shifty in his approach?
   
   What the commentator seemed unable (or unwilling) to do was to acknowledge two opposite truths, which I’d state like this:
   
   

• On the one hand, America has historically been Canada’s closest friend, our ally in security and commerce.
  
  
• On the other hand, America has recently shown itself to be uncharacteristically hostile to Canadian interests and disrespectful of Canadian sovereignty.
  
  A critical thinker can view the past and the present at once, can acknowledge the need to reset a relationship while still working within it. A one-idea-at-a-time thinker can't manage such complexity.
  
  As you educate nonexpert audiences, the key is to acknowledge the bias toward one-track thinking while showing the possibility of dual-track thought. In many cases, this means explaining the difference between either-or thinking and both-and thinking.
  
  It also means acknowledging the discomfort of holding two contrasting ideas in your mind at the same time. It’s far easier to think “Carney is anti-Trump” or “Carney is pro-Trump” than to contemplate the challenges of navigating a multi-layered, troubled relationship with our neighbor to the South.
  

3. Provide multiple pathways. It doesn’t take much to grab an audience’s attention or raise their hackles. You can do that, as we saw in the bulleted list above, just by telegraphing a few alarming points.
   
   It takes more time, and more words (and perhaps visuals), to guide a reader from where they are to the place of understanding where you’d like them to be. So be careful not to make conciseness a supreme virtue.
   
   Rather than trying to vacuum-seal your meaning into the tiniest possible package, allow it room to expand to the necessary size. Give your ideas enough space that your audience can understand the background to your thinking, the different parts of the novel concept you’re sharing, and the significance of it. Also allow room for the audience to raise and explore objections; encourage critical inquiry rather than shutting it down in the interest of scoring a quick point.
   
   How can you allow for such exploration while still meeting the popular demand for “quick and dirty” explanation? Provide different paths through your content to accommodate the interests and informational needs of different audience members.
   
   For example, let’s say you’re creating a briefing note for senior civil servants to share findings concerning the link between red algae and declining fish stocks. Some of the civil servants in your audience will already be familiar with red algae, its connection with climate change, and its threat to fish stocks. Others will be new to the topic. In addition, some of the readers will be highly interested in the subject matter whereas others will feel neutral or uninterested.
   
   While your first instinct might be to craft a minimalist document that will be easy for anyone to skim, that approach would severely limit your impact. You’d lose the opportunity to engage those members of your audience who have the most potential to become champions for your cause.
   
   A smarter approach would be to craft a comprehensive document that’s accessible and easy to navigate. A short summary at the beginning would be helpful to give readers a preview of what to expect. You could use descriptive headings to break up the content, allowing readers to go deep into sections that interest them while skipping over others. Tables and diagrams could provide focal points to direct attention to key points that could be missed if readers are skimming hastily, perhaps over multiple reading sessions.
   
   Through thoughtful design, you can facilitate different paths to learning without bogging down in detail those who aren’t yet ready to learn.

Complexity and clarity can co-exist

Despite the anti-intellectual zeitgeist, complexity isn’t going away anytime soon. And as the problems we face becoming increasingly knotty, complex thinking is our only hope of generating valid solutions.

This is where the power of design comes into play. Well-designed communication products enable the audience to get a grip on complexity. To borrow a phrase from a popular website on management thinking, they serve as “mindtools” to help the audience engage with the real world, which is neither flat nor simple.

The role of design, says Norman, is not to eliminate complexity but to “tame” it, to make it less wild and scary and more manageable. This is a key distinction for knowledge mobilizers to bear in mind. Our job is not to strip research of its complexity—to make the lion into a tabby cat—but to design research communication in ways that make it easier to handle.

It’s deceptively easy, according to Norman, to design a simple solution. What’s harder to create, and yet desperately needed in our world today, are complex solutions that are accessible and learnable.

There, in a nutshell, is the challenge of knowledge mobilization: to put into the hands of change-makers “mindtools” that are suitably complex but also desirable and usable. Intelligent design is the opposite of unthinking simplification, and at this critical point in the evolution of our species and our planet, it offers the only viable route forward.

[1] Norman, D. (2011). Living with Complexity. [Kindle edition]. MIT Press. https://www.amazon.ca/Living-Complexity-Donald-Norman-ebook/dp/B08MQB3KJR/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.0OlV38hR-dNfyUzQXt9PUMhXzbQvzGuBGHs1x0nubWq3OFdXnHqeXjoMXOMwT5Uet-r9sFJTBZ-DEa5A23mCRfb-sbo0GJpTbQnFvoIxkX_X5iWEXMiB5kiW-CuZTswGdhP3zXb12xEN4gkmzIDoG4UKCpy54foROsFukZB33ZPJ2mygfvjkKFpSsTYhc_atQY1oaHpqEKBljulvhVBRaVeA5YRigy-yP5U0KFkU6DAqR1qdWYR8_5p7ym299YQ7j84a_PyKo1pBCT96sQ6tLsuoqvBXFpccZY8LWgaBosfe13RTCtNSxhhIuUZU_W2Da_yONDLLjCidEsyOqhCMLBJXviRzHXuV8FEsHdTvOMzW29JkHZFQ9JTktHLe14yRPGKY9KOodOLk7B4Sy22ccxIZJ3RrfEqQaee37SzE1mo.ar-U1QfZ2Od5NCZRZ0caUomPLEsWYfhDDocsOJE0o7I&qid=1743455926&sr=8-1

[2] VandeHei, J., Allen, M., & Schwartz, R. (2022). Smart brevity: The power of saying more with less. Workman Publishing, p.6.