This is not really a routine; it is just a chaotic morning based on reactive behavior. When the film is posted online, people look at the morning and imagine they are seeing a well-planned routine rather than the randomness of life.
This hypothetical scenario illustrates the issue with complexity: it is unsustainable without effort. The more individual constituent parts a system has, the greater the chance of its breaking down. Addressing one of the constituent parts inevitably affects another see the Butterfly Effect. Unintended and unexpected consequences are likely to occur. Even when the likelihood of failure in each component is slight, the probability of an overall failure can be high if many components are involved.
This is why complexity is less common than we think. It is unsustainable without constant maintenance, self-organization, or adaptation. Chaos tends to disguise itself as complexity. A musician walks barefoot across a zebra-crossing on an album cover. People decide he died in a car crash and was replaced by a lookalike. People conclude that he is a blood-sucking reptilian alien taking on a human form.
A photograph shows an indistinct shape beneath the water of a Scottish lake. The area floods with tourists hoping to glimpse a surviving prehistoric creature. A new technology overwhelms people. So, they deduce that it is the product of a government mind-control program. Conspiracy theories are the ultimate symptom of our desire to find complexity in the world.
Disasters happen and chaos is our natural state. The idea that hidden forces animate our lives is an appealing one. It seems rational. But as we know, we are all much less rational and logical than we think. Studies have shown that a high percentage of people believe in some sort of conspiracy.
According to research by Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Beliefs such as these are present in all types of people, regardless of class, age, gender, race, socioeconomic status, occupation, or education level. Conspiracy theories are invariably far more complex than reality. Faced with natural disasters and political or economic instability, we are more likely to concoct elaborate explanations. In the face of horrific but chaotic events such as Hurricane Katrina, or the recent Grenfell Tower fire, many people decide that secret institutions are to blame.
Since the s, a substantial number of people have believed that McCartney died in a car crash and was replaced by a lookalike, usually said to be a Scottish man named William Campbell. Of course, conspiracy theorists declare, The Beatles wanted their most loyal fans to know this, so they hid clues in songs and on album covers.
The beliefs surrounding the Abbey Road album are particularly illustrative of the desire to spot complexity in randomness and chaos. A police car is parked in the background — an homage to the officers who helped cover up the crash. The s were certainly a turbulent time, so is it any wonder that scores of people pored over album art or played records backwards, looking for evidence of a complex hidden conspiracy?
As Henry Louis Gates Jr. We have all, at some point, had a conversation with someone who speaks like philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote: using incessant jargon and technical terms even when simpler synonyms exist and would be perfectly appropriate.
We have all heard people say things which we do not understand, but which we do not question for fear of sounding stupid. Jargon is an example of how complexity bias affects our communication and language usage. In an article for The Guardian, James Gingell describes his work translating scientific jargon into plain, understandable English:.
The first step is getting rid of the technical language. I expunge the esoteric. I trim and clip and pare and hack and burn until only the barest, most easily understood elements remain. Jargon…can be useful for people as a shortcut to communicating complex concepts. Gingell writes that even the most intelligent scientists struggle to differentiate between thinking and speaking and writing like a scientist, and thinking like a person with minimal scientific knowledge.
Unnecessarily complex language is not just annoying. The use of jargon in areas such as politics and economics does real harm. People without the requisite knowledge to understand it feel alienated and removed from important conversations.
It leads people to believe that they are not intelligent enough to understand politics, or not educated enough to comprehend economics. When a politician talks of fiscal charters or rolling four-quarter growth measurements in a public statement, they are sending a crystal clear message to large numbers of people whose lives will be shaped by their decisions: this is not about you.
Complexity bias is a serious issue in politics. For those in the public eye, complex language can be a means of minimizing the criticism of their actions. Gingell considers jargon to be a threat to democracy:. Economics and economic decisions are more important than ever now, too. So we should implore our journalists and politicians to write and speak to us plainly. Our democracy depends on it. In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.
Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.
An example of the problems with jargon is the Sokal affair. Even so, the paper was published in a respected journal. Secondly, the postmodern sciences deconstruct and transcend the Cartesian metaphysical distinctions between humankind and Nature, observer and observed, Subject and Object. Jargon does have its place. Imagine you have the determination to reduce complexity in every step of the process.
Cast off the chains of complexity that are holding you back. You are lighter on your feet, ready to make the next move. We draft plans with them to change how decisions are made, and together create roadmaps to advance and get to a place where they are free to move and improve again.
Want to find out more? Chat to one of our experts , or download our free guide on improving your IT delivery. The aim of the article is not to put forward the idea of deletion for deletion's sake. Sometimes solutions to things are large, this approach aims to simplify as much as possible. Read more. This is part four - the final part - in a short series of articles on the nature of metrics generally but within product and especially software development particularly.
English Dutch. Published January 26, A gradually increasing complexity There are many reasons why organisations gain complexity, why they add unnecessary complexity into their ecosystem. Click on image to enlarge How to define unnecessary complexity? You will know your IT systems are unnecessarily complex when: They are hard to change. The rewards are huge. Why should you consider giving priority to reducing complexity in your IT systems?
Shave that yak! Take away the unnecessary distractions. Helpful questions in your battle with complexity: Do we really need this platform or feature? Did we validate that with the users? If we are adding this, what are we switching off? For each layer, you can create a facade and then make the classes of each layer communicate with each another via those facades. This approach looks very similar to the Mediator pattern. Declare and implement this interface in a new facade class.
The facade should redirect the calls from the client code to appropriate objects of the subsystem. The facade should be responsible for initializing the subsystem and managing its further life cycle unless the client code already does this.
To get the full benefit from the pattern, make all the client code communicate with the subsystem only via the facade. Now the client code is protected from any changes in the subsystem code.
For example, when a subsystem gets upgraded to a new version, you will only need to modify the code in the facade. If the facade becomes too big , consider extracting part of its behavior to a new, refined facade class. Facade defines a new interface for existing objects, whereas Adapter tries to make the existing interface usable.
Adapter usually wraps just one object, while Facade works with an entire subsystem of objects. Abstract Factory can serve as an alternative to Facade when you only want to hide the way the subsystem objects are created from the client code.
Flyweight shows how to make lots of little objects, whereas Facade shows how to make a single object that represents an entire subsystem. Facade and Mediator have similar jobs: they try to organize collaboration between lots of tightly coupled classes. A Facade class can often be transformed into a Singleton since a single facade object is sufficient in most cases. Facade is similar to Proxy in that both buffer a complex entity and initialize it on its own.
Unlike Facade , Proxy has the same interface as its service object, which makes them interchangeable. Hey, I have just reduced the price for all products. Check it out ». Intent Facade is a structural design pattern that provides a simplified interface to a library, a framework, or any other complex set of classes.
Problem Imagine that you must make your code work with a broad set of objects that belong to a sophisticated library or framework.
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