Becoming More Complicated Makes You Wiser
There’s an assumption that sits in most of our conversations about complexity, which is that it represents some sort of tangle to be straightened out – an obstacle between us and the clarity we’re perpetually looking for. We speak of “cutting through the complexity” as though complexity were fog, and we celebrate whoever wields the sharpest rhetorical blade. This assumption, however widespread, gets things backwards. Complexity is not the enemy of understanding, and in many of the most important situations we face, complexity is the only honest description of what is actually there. Our refusal to meet it on its own terms is exactly what causes us to go so wrong.
The cybernetician Ross Ashby captured this in his argument that only complexity can tame complexity. What he meant is that a system capable of responding adequately to a complex environment must itself possess a degree of complexity sufficient to match that environment. A thermostat can manage a room’s temperature because its operational logic works for the range of thermal variation it has to deal with in such rooms. Yet no thermostat can manage a marriage, a community, or an economy, because those systems produce a range and depth of variation that no simple mechanism can track. If you bring only a simple mind to a complex situation, you will not simplify the situation – you will only misread it, and then act on your misreading.
This is what complexification means, and it’s a practice, not just a concept. It means actively working to develop a more sophisticated internal architecture, one capable of holding more variables: tracking their interactions, remaining sensitive to change over time, and resisting the pull towards premature conclusion. To complexify oneself is to become the kind of observer who sees more of what is actually present rather than only what their existing categories have prepared them to notice.
The journey from surface to depth
The organisational theorist Karl Weick described the intellectual journey I’m discussing in terms of three stages that I’d say map cleanly onto lived experience.
- We begin with superficial simplicity, which is the condition of someone who looks at a situation and finds it straightforward because they haven’t looked closely enough. It can be stupidity but also innocent inexperience. Often, it’s the particular confidence that comes from having a theory (irrespective of its adequacy) that seems to explain things. The theory makes predictions, the predictions seem to hold, and so the simplicity feels earned rather than assumed.
- Then comes confused complexity, the uncomfortable middle stage in which one starts to perceive that things aren’t as tidy as they initially appeared. (That initial stage isn’t necessarily a short period of time. In many cases it can be years.) The more you investigate, the more variables you uncover. The more variables you uncover, the more interactions between them you are forced to account for. The narrative that seemed so neat starts to fray at the edges. This is the stage (and quite early on into it) many people abandon, either retreating back to their original simplicity or becoming so overwhelmed by the multiplicity of factors that they throw up their hands and conclude that nothing is knowable at all.
- Those who push through, often after a sustained period, eventually arrive at what Weick called profound simplicity, which is something categorically different from the simplicity they started with. Profound simplicity is the capacity to summarise a complex understanding in a way that is communicable and manageable, to offer a compressed but accurate account that doesn’t flatten what is genuinely layered. This is the kind of understanding demonstrated by the experienced physician who arrives at a diagnosis, the seasoned negotiator who reads the room, the scholar who can state in one sentence something that took a lifetime of scholarship to earn the right to say. The simplicity is genuine, but it contains everything that was worked through in order to arrive at it.
So to reiterate:
- Superficial simplicity
- Confused complexity
- Profound simplicity
The trouble, as Weick recognised, is that superficial simplicity and profound simplicity look very similar from the outside. Both speak clearly and appear confident. The difference is in the depth of understanding that underlies the clarity, and that depth is not always visible to those who lack it themselves.
Complexity Is in the Eye of the Beholder
One of the more counterintuitive features of complexity is that it isn’t just a property of the world. It is also, in a meaningful sense, a property of the observer. The same situation will appear radically different in its texture and depth depending on who is looking at it and what categories of perception they bring to it.
Think about what happens when someone skilled in reading human interaction enters a room. Where a less attuned observer might simply hear what people are saying, the perceptive person is simultaneously processing tone, timing, body language, the significant pauses, the words chosen and the words avoided, the way certain topics cause a subtle shift in posture. None of this is inaccessible in principle, but it requires a developed vocabulary, a trained attention, and a willingness to hold multiple layers of meaning in mind simultaneously. The person who reduces a conversation to its verbal content alone is not wrong about what was said but they are missing the fuller conversation that was occurring in the same room.
The Proclamation is perhaps the most powerful illustration of this principle. The words have been the same for over a millennium but the range of what different readers perceive in it is so vast that one could be forgiven for wondering whether they’re reading the same document at all.
Think about what a reader encounters if they approach the text with a surface-level vocabulary and no developed framework of interpretation. They will find instructions, narratives, warnings, and descriptions of the afterlife. What they won’t perceive, because they lack the categories to perceive it, is the covenantal architecture that organises the whole. The Arabic word kufr will register as “disbelief,” a purely cognitive category within the frame of modern religion, but the one who understands that the Proclamation operates within a covenantal structure, that it is addressed to Semites already bound by an ancestral pledge (mīthāq) and perceives something categorically different in the same word. Kufr becomes faithlessness either through denial or rejection – the rupture of a binding commitment, and a moral and relational failure rather than merely an intellectual one. The text has not changed but the observer has.
The same applies to taqwā. For the reader without the covenantal framework, it’s read as “fear of God,” which is significantly flattened. It loses the specific quality of loyal vigilance within a relationship of mutual obligation. The reader who carries the covenantal categories perceives in the same Arabic letters a much richer phenomenon: the disposition of a covenant-partner who remains alert to the terms of the bond, who doesn’t drift into the negligence of habitual security. Again, the text is identical but the depth of what is received is determined entirely by what the observer brings to it.
What makes this particularly interesting is that the Proclamation isn’t passive about this. It encodes the observer-dependence of its own reception directly into its address. The opening of the second chapter announces that this is guidance for those who are actually loyal. The implication is that the categories required to receive what is being communicated are themselves a prerequisite for receiving it. You won’t understand the covenantal address if you don’t already have some orientation towards the covenant. It’s not that the message is hiding from those who lack the categories, it is simply invisible at the level they are reading, the way a musical composition is inaudible to someone who hears only noise where others hear structure.
The Proclamation also uses, repeatedly, the image of rain falling on different kinds of ground. The rain is the same but what grows, and whether anything grows at all, depends entirely on what receives it. This is a precise epistemological claim about the relationship between revelation and the observer. The Proclamation goes out into the world carrying its full complexity, its covenantal grammar, its Abrahamic resonances, its layered address to the broad Semitic experience. What any given reader receives from it is bounded by the complexity they bring to it. The more sophisticated the categories, the more of what is actually there becomes perceptible.
This is also why reducing the Proclamation’s study to the extraction of legal rulings or mischaracterised it as a “religious” book has always impoverished those communities that practised it most exclusively because the legal surface is only one stratum of a multi-dimensional address, and a reader trained only to find rulings will find rules and nothing else. They will miss the message’s own account of why those rulings exist – and the context they exist in, what kind of human being they are designed to form, and within what larger story of covenant, faithfulness, and restoration they are embedded. One can’t say that the text has withheld this from them. They simply don’t yet have the categories to see it.
This is why developing a richer language for describing phenomena matters so much. Language goes beyond being a tool for reporting what we see, it is constitutive of what we’re capable of seeing in the first place. When you acquire a vocabulary for a domain, whether it’s the emotional nuances of a relationship, the structural dynamics of an organisation, or the grammar of a tradition, you gain the capacity to discern distinctions that were previously invisible to you. You don’t just describe more, you actually perceive more, because perception is shaped by the categories we have available to interpret what arrives through our senses.
This is also why oversimplification is such a specific kind of error. It doesn’t just come down to using fewer concepts than the situation requires. It’s where one is actively missing features of the context that would change what one does. To abstract too heavily from a situation is to substitute your model for the reality it was meant to represent, and to act on the model rather than the reality. The reverse error is equally real: one can be so immersed in the particulars of a context that one can’t step back far enough to perceive the larger patterns operating within it. Wisdom is being able to move fluidly between levels of analysis, zooming in on particulars when that is what is required and pulling back to structural patterns when those are what is called for.
Complexity Becomes Unmanageable Only When It Is Singular
There is also the distinction between what’s genuinely complex and what is merely complicated. Something complicated has many parts, but those parts follow a logic that can, in principle, be fully specified. A jet engine or tax is complicated but given sufficient expertise and time, the whole thing can be mapped. Something complex is very different. A complex system is one whose components interact in ways that produce emergent properties, outcomes that can’t be predicted simply by analysing the parts in isolation – it’s where the sum is greater than its constitutive parts. Human relationships are complex. Organisations are complex. Political communities are complex. Societies are complex – and genuinely complex things can’t be compressed into a formula. There is no algorithm for a marriage, no equation for a culture, no theoretical model that fully captures a living tradition.
This doesn’t mean that complex things are beyond understanding. It means that understanding them requires something more than a catalogue of their components. It requires attention to interaction, to context, to change over time, and to the perspective of the observer. It requires the kind of understanding that is narrative as much as analytical, that holds pattern and uniqueness in tension rather than collapsing one into the other.
Occam’s razor, the principle that one should not multiply explanatory entities beyond necessity, is often invoked in this context, and it’s a valuable principle when properly understood. However, it is frequently misapplied as a licence for premature simplification as though the simplest account of something is always to be preferred regardless of whether it does justice to the phenomena. The correct principle is something closer to Einstein’s formulation where things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler than necessary. The phrase “no simpler than necessary” carries the whole weight of the distinction – the necessity is set by the world, not by our preference for tidiness.
Scenario Thinking and the Cost of Single-Story Minds
One of the most practically consequential expressions of the kind of sophisticated thinking I’m describing is the capacity for scenario thinking, the ability to hold multiple possible futures in mind simultaneously rather than implicitly assuming that the world will unfold in the single trajectory one has imagined.
People whose thinking has been complexified know that the world is capable of behaving in ways they haven’t anticipated. They build this awareness into how they deliberate and plan. They don’t assume their preferred scenario is simply the most likely one just because it’s theirs. By contrast, people who haven’t developed this capacity tend to operate on the basis of a single imagined scenario, and then to engage in what we might call tenacious justification when the world fails to conform to it or falls apart. They’re not necessarily lying or being deliberately irrational. Sometimes they simply lack the internal complexity to model alternative states of the world as genuine possibilities rather than theoretical footnotes.
This is why organisations and groups that invest in what is sometimes called “war gaming” or structured scenario planning like the Socratic method of debate employed by early medieval Kufan jurists are, at their best, doing something cognitively serious. It’s not about running interesting thought experiments. They are developing, in the people who participate, a more complex picture of the possibility space they inhabit, and thereby making those people more capable responders when reality produces the unexpected, as it reliably does!
The Question at the Back of the Mind
Perhaps the most important practical upshot of everything I’ve been discussing is a disposition rather than a technique, which is the habit of keeping a question permanently alive at the back of your mind: what am I missing? Is there something in this situation that my frameworks haven’t taken into account?
The answer to that question, if we’re being honest, is always yes because the world is always more complex than any language of description allows. Shakespeare, in Hamlet, gestures at this when Horatio, confronted with the inexplicable, reaches for the language of the supernatural, and Hamlet replies that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in any philosophy. The point is that the world systematically exceeds our models of it, and the appropriate response to that fact is the active humility of the perpetual learner.
To live with that question alive in one’s mind is to remain open to the kind of recalibration that genuine understanding requires. In my experience it’s what distinguishes the thinker who grows from the one who merely accumulates confirmation. In the end, it’s what complexification is for: not to make us more complicated in our language but to make us more adequate in our response to the irreducible complexity of reality.
