Absorbing Complexity

To create simplicity, organizations have to absorb complexity.

TL;DR: Customers want simple experiences, and most companies respond with promises instead of the work required to deliver them. Real simplicity is expensive to build and invisible once it’s built, which is exactly why competitors rarely bother and why the companies willing to do it end up with something genuinely hard to copy.

More and more leaders are beginning to understand the value of simplicity. While simple customer experiences are an important goal for many organizations today, the journey itself is not so simple.

Simplicity makes sense. From taglines to elevator speeches, simple ideas travel and have a better chance of breaking through the market noise. Simple messages are easier to remember and repeat. Designing for simplicity is a recognized customer experience goal. Channeling Dieter Rams’ “less but better” sensibility, Apple has taken this to an extreme degree with its product design, and simplicity is often the reason for much UX design today.

Simplicity suggests ease of understanding and use. Many organizations promote how it’s easy to get started, easy to order a sample, easy to buy, easy to get support, and so on. The belief, and the increasingly well-researched understanding, is that in a world of complexity, customers crave simplicity.

We agree. In fact, here is the last chapter of our book in its entirety: “Keep it simple.”

But this is where things get complicated. When experiences are made simple, the complexity doesn’t just disappear. Creating simple experiences is hard work. Was Amazon’s one-click purchase and overnight delivery juggernaut easy to set up? No. Amazon’s investors showed years of patience before that patience paid off, and it paid off enormously. Neither was designing like Dieter Rams nor building a design system disciplined enough to make an entire product line feel effortless. But the payoff, in every case, forever changed the category.

These organizations understood a critical reality: they had to absorb complexity to create simplicity.

Internalizing customer complexity isn’t the norm for companies optimized around their own core competencies, pushing everything else outward. Industrial-era thinking pushes against absorbing internal complexity. In many mature industries, customers are still confused by distributors, influencers, and channels stacked between them and what they actually need. Today’s customers won’t tolerate that. The responsibility for a simple experience sits with each competitor, not the customer trying to navigate around them.

It's also not a single feature you ship once. It’s every interaction a customer has with you, held to the same standard, for as long as they're your customer.

This doesn’t mean doing everything yourself. Amazon doesn't drive every delivery truck. It means someone has to own the outcome even when the work runs through other hands, reps, dealers, partners, vendors, so that what reaches the customer feels like one coherent experience rather than a relay race; they can feel the handoffs.

Simplicity wins, and it compounds. The companies willing to do the hard work below the waterline build something competitors can’t easily copy, because it was never really about the one feature everyone can see. It’s about everything holding it up that they can't.

Forward-looking leaders will recognize the value of simplicity and the discipline of absorbing complexity on their customers’ behalf. It’s hard work below the waterline.

It will win the long game.