I was in an interesting meeting today. Well, the meeting was not 100% interesting but it got me thinking about a certain habit that people find hard to break. In some company cultures, people gravitate towards hard solutions, not the ones that are simple.
This "complexity culture" values solutions with lots of intricate parts and concepts, not the ones that follow the 80/20, keep-it-simple-stupid mentality. Although I recognize that not all problems are simple and that sometimes the solution really is quite complex, it seems like a lot of groups stop there content with a solution that looks impressive on a whiteboard. They don't really try to decompose the solution to a simple principal and work up from there. Since I've observed this in a few different companies, I wonder if that is just the way technical people are wired.
I have a background in economics which has a fairly simplistic framework and view of what motivates people. I like that simplicity because it makes a lot of human phenomena understandable. I know that economics doesn't explain everything (although some disagree), but it is a good 80/20 proxy for a whole range of behavior. Maybe it is this background that causes me to want to distill things down to a principle and work from there? I wonder if anyone has studied the different attitudes towards complex solutions in different companies?