Thursday, March 21, 2024

Mangled Complexity

There is something hard to do.

Some of the people involved are having trouble wrapping their heads around the problem.

They get some parts of their understanding wrong. In small, subtle ways, but still wrong.

Then they base the solution on their understanding.

Their misunderstanding causes a clump of complexity. It is not accidental, they deliberately choose to solve the problem in a specific way. It is not really artificial, as the solution itself isn’t piling on complexity, instead it comes from a misunderstanding of the problem space, thus in a way the problem itself.

This is mangled complexity. The misunderstanding causes a hiccup, and some of the complexity on top is mangled.

Mangled complexity is extraordinarily hard to get rid of. It is usually tied to a person, their agenda, and the way they are going about performing their role. Often one person gets it wrong, then ropes in a lot of others who share the same mistake, so it starts to become institutionalized. Everybody insists that the mistake is correct, and everybody is incentivized to continue to insist that the mistake is correct.

Sometimes even when you can finally dispel the mistake, people don’t want to fix the issue as they fear it is too much effort. So, it gets locked into the bottom of all sorts of other issues.

We are building a house of cards when we choose to ignore things we find are wrong. A delay caused by unmangling complexity is a massive amount of time saved.

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