Metaskills- Five Talents for the Robotic Age

by Marty Neumeier

  A lack of discipline. Simplifying is hard work. It takes vision and courage to fight ambiguity and clutter. It’s easier to let customers sort through the mess themselves, then justify it as “customer choice.” Only a warrior like Jobs would insist on total simplicity. While other technology companies loaded up their products with functions and buttons, he treated buttons like blemishes, and had them removed.

  Market opportunism. When a chance to increase revenues comes along, many companies grab at it, despite the effect on long-term strategy. With every opportunistic grab, complexity increases and focus decreases. This is particularly true with companies who chase fashion over function, as Dell did with its recent line of overtly designed computers, most of which placed style above substance. Hemlines go up, hemlines go down.

  Personal fear. Companies are collections of individuals, and individuals can make little decisions that have large cumulative effects. Various fears, including the fear of embarassment, the fear of being singled out, and the fear of being fired, can cause people to hide behind a smokescreen of ambiguity. “All erroneous ideas would perish of their own accord if expressed clearly,” said the writer Luc de Clapiers. Better to be unclear than unemployed. This may explain a lot of overblown language, like on the sign next to security at Gatwick Airport: “Passenger shoe repatriation area only.” Put your shoes on here might have been clearer, but not nearly as important sounding. Now imagine a whole company talking like that.

  Just as the marketplace is suffering from clutter, so is the English language. Writing expert William Zinsser once said, “We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.” In other words, verbal clutter.

  Even before Zinsser, Will Strunk gave this advice in The Elements of Style: “Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, nor that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects in outline, but that every word tell.”

  A newspaper editor recently received this tweet: “Big story here on natural disaster. Shall I send?” The editor replied, “Send 600 words.” The young reporter issued another tweet from the field: “Can’t be told in less than 1200.” The editor shot back, “Story of creation told in 600. Try it.”

  Hemingway supposedly bet someone in a bar that he could write a complete story in less than ten words. “No one can do that!” cried the bartender. Hemingway thought for a minute. On the back of the bill, he wrote six words: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”

  Creativity consultant Andy Stefanovich found an even more concise expression of a big idea: an insurance company in Norway named If.

  When critics complain that something is “overdesigned,” what they mean is that it’s underdesigned and overdecorated. You can’t really overdesign something, because design is the process of improvement. You never hear people complain that something is overimproved. You do hear them complain that something is frilly, pompous, confusing, or unnecessary. Adding decorative elements to an underperforming object is not design but clumsy obfuscation. More is never enough.

  “Many of my favorite dishes are those based on the fewest ingredients,” said superchef Mario Batali. “And when there are fewer members in the choir, each element must sing perfectly, or harmony is lost.” The reason too many elements are dangerous to design is that they become hard to control. Some will cancel others out, some will add irritating noise, and others will drain the vitality from the original concept. These vampire elements may not kill the project, but they can quickly reduce it to zombiehood.

  Zombie designs are everywhere, although you don’t always notice them until they get in your way. Take the Swiss Army Knife, a classic metaphor for the value of “more.” The $260 Victorinox WorkChamp XL bristles with 28 clever blades, including a scissors, corkscrew, tweezers, toothpick, pliers, metal saw, hoof cleaner, belt cutter, and shackle opener. It’s a whole toolshed in a single product. While impressive as a brand symbol, it’s not the product that sells the most. Instead, it’s a much simpler knife—with only a few tools. Most people view the extra blades in the WorkChamp as costly clutter.

  How do you know what should be included and what should be uncluded? Where do you draw the line? Here are five little principles to help you simplify:

  1. Think big, spend small. When Acorn Computers’ Hermann Hauser led the effort to design an elegant processing chip in the early 1980s, he made two crucial decisions. “I gave them no people, and I gave them no money. There was no way they for them to come up with a complex chip.”

  2. Kill ten birds with one stone. Find the place where several problems line up, then knock them down in a single move. For example, organize potential solutions into lists of what’s cheap, what’s new, what’s available, what’s different, what’s compelling, what’s proprietary, and so on, then choose the solution that makes the most out of the least.

  3. Be clear. Create solutions that are deliberate, single-minded, and free of conceptual noise. “If a man writes clearly enough,” said Hemingway, “anyone can see if he fakes.” The same applies to all creative disciplines. It’s harder to fool yourself when you can clearly see what you’re doing.

  4. Look for the obvious. When presented with two explanations, prefer the simpler. This is the conceptual tool called Occam’s Razor, named after medieval philosopher William of Ockhan. Often the best answers are hidden plain sight, so when you slap yourself on the forehead, you’ve probably found it.

  5. Keep subtracting. After you’ve included everything you think is necessary, start uncluding. Remove one element at a time to see whether it hurts the balance, the proportion, or the unity of the solution. You may be surprised how much energy is released with every subtraction. When you’ve finally removed the last scrap of clutter, you can then improve what’s left.

  All the lessons of invention come down to this: The best design tool is a long eraser with a pencil at one end.

  The art of simplexity

  We tend to view simplicity and complexity as opposites, like two sides of a teeter-totter: when one goes up the other goes down. But this isn’t true. The enemy of simplicity isn’t complexity, but messiness. Likewise, the enemy of complexity isn’t simplicity, but also messiness. Complexity and simplicity are both fighting on the same side—the side of increasing order. While complexity seeks order through addition, simplicity seeks it through subtraction. Together they produce richness and usability, two complementary values that have driven the whole of evolution.

  The phrase “To be or not to be” is a simple string of words, and each word in it is equally simple. But the meaning behind the phrase is profoundly complex. Namely, why is life worth living? It’s not only the basis of a great play, but of the world’s great philosophies and religions. Therefore, is “To be or not to be” a simple question, or a complex one?

  As I write this sentence on my MacBook Air, I can’t help but notice how effortless the interface is. The keyboard is delicate and responsive to the touch; the screen reports back instantly with perfect fidelity; and the whole machine performs like an extension of my mind and fingertips. Yet I’m perfectly aware that this is a complicated machine. It’s jam-packed with processors and memory chips and controllers and batteries and cards and cables and LEDS and speakers and other miracles of miniaturization, and each of these is the product of many minds and many years of cooperation and competition. So, is a MacBook Air a simple product, or a complex one?

  It may be helpful to think of simplicity and complexity as a combo-concept called simplexity. Simplexity stands in opposition to disorder, to entropy, to the messiness that has no meaning.

  There’s nothing valuable about a mess. It offers complexity without clarity. How do you describe the rubble left by the path of a tornado? The only way to describe i
t is by calling it a mess, since only the actual mess can describe itself. The problem with messes is that one looks a lot like another. One cluttered website looks a lot like another cluttered website. One “comprehensive” product offering looks much like another comprehensive product offering. One convoluted business model is no different—nor more valuable—than any other one. A mess is counterproductive when you’re trying to create meaningful differentiation or a competitive advantage.

  You know you’ve found simplexity when you can describe a complicated entity using just a few words, a brief formula, or a clearly conceived diagram. When JetBlue says every passenger flies business class for the price of coach, they’ve encapsulated their entire value proposition in one sentence. But when American Airlines says passengers can fly without putting their lives on hold, they’re unable to find a competitive advantage other than wi-fi. One unfocused airline looks a lot like another to most people. American’s difficulty in expressing a clear value proposition reveals a lack of simplexity.

  In The User Illusion, Tor Nørretranders introduces the term exformation to describe how meaning is created. He says that the real value of a message or a product doesn’t come from its final content, but from the content that’s been discarded along the way—its exformation. The more exformation, the more valuable the information.

  For example, by writing 500 words off the top of my head to describe a new product, I could quickly create a page of text. But I’d also be creating a more difficult task for my reader, who now has to sift through my rambling sentences to extract any useful ideas. In systems terminology, I’d be shifting the burden to my reader; in the language of economics, I’d be externalizing the costs of communication. The value of my work would be low.

  But let’s say I labored a bit longer on my text, making sure I had the key ideas in place, that they were revealed in a logical order, that the language was crisp and clear, and that all needless words and ideas had been stripped out as exformation. Even though my text has shrunk to only 200 words, it’s now many times more valuable than the original 500-word mess. My reader will be able to quickly read it and digest it, and easily remember it and act on it.

  When you apply the principle of exformation to a message, you increase its meaning, and therefore its value. The amount of meaning that can be easily extracted from a message is called its logical depth. According to IBM Fellow Charles Bennett, the more “calculating time” a sender invests—either in his head or on a computer—the more meaning the receiver will get from it, and the greater its logical depth.

  In the world of fashion, Tomas Maier works hard to eliminate all the unnecessary elements in his designs. He doesn’t stop until a shirt or a dress reaches a state he calls “a certain nothingness.” Sometimes, he says, “you look at a piece of abstract art and it’s just, like, a line, and somebody standing next to you says, ’I could do that.’ Well, actually—no.” Not unless you first spend a decade or so absorbing the lessons of your discipline, then bring your work to a high level of simplexity.

  Simplexity does not imply subtraction alone. If you threw out half the parts in a laptop, you might achieve simplicity, but the product wouldn’t work. To retain the richness of simplexity, you need compression, not reduction. You need to figure out how to squeeze all the goodness of a complex solution into a package that’s easy to use. Think about the electrical grid that brings power into your house. The grid itself is fairly complex, but you don’t have to worry about that. All you do is flip the switch. The rest of the system is hidden on the other side of the wall.

  Apple’s lead designer, Jonathan Ive, says his task is “to solve incredibly complex problems and make their resolution appear inevitable and incredibly simple, so that you have no sense how difficult it was.” Maybe this is what Leonardo meant when he called simplicity the ultimate sophistication.

  A reality check

  The no-process process is not a license to play around endlessly, any more than the standard process is a license to do mediocre work on time. If the goal is excellence, you have to finish, and you have to do great work. This begs the question, What is great work? How do you know when you’re finished? Here are ten simple tests:

  1. Is it surprising? Will it scare some people? Does it challenge notions of what’s normal? Did it reframe the problem? Did you learn something new in the process? The heart of innovation is novelty. So if your solution doesn’t disrupt expectations, it has little chance of disrupting a category, a marketplace, or an industry.

  2. Does it have fitness for duty? Does it fill the “answer-shaped hole”? Is there a good match between what it is and what it does? Is it economical to produce, launch, maintain, and use? Does the solution seem inevitable? Billy Baldwin, one of the last century’s most influential interior designers, believed that nothing was in good taste unless it suited its purpose. “What’s practical is beautiful,” he said.

  3. Are the underlying assumptions true? Which ones must be correct for the outcome to be a success? Is there a way to test the assumptions using the prototype? If the assumptions prove untrue, in what ways must the solution change?

  4. Does it have a clear focus? Is it single-minded? Is there a key subject, a central theme, or a main benefit to anchor the proposed solution to its purpose? If it seems like it’s trying to satisfy too many goals, or too many people, go back to the drawing board.

  5. Are the elements in harmony? Are they in the right balance? Is each one necessary? Do they create a unified whole? Is it beautiful? When the choir is singing together, it should sound bigger and richer than the number of singers would suggest.

  6. Will the right people love it? Will it inspire loyalty? Will it attract talent to your mission? If you try to please everyone, you’ll end up pleasing no one. If you please the wrong people while leaving the right ones unmoved, you may wish you had done a little testing before going public. Henry Ford didn’t believe in testing, and found out too late that the 1958 Edsel was a car without a market.

  7. Is it courageous? Even testing won’t take all the risk out of innovation. At some point you’ll need to stick your neck out. Luckily, most people admire risk taking, which is why so many bold ideas have managed to attract fanatic followings. Courage reads as authenticity to most people.

  8. Is it valuable beyond the near and now? Does it link up with other great ideas? Will it provide a platform for further innovation? Does it take other people into consideration—not just you and your company, but your customers and society at large? Does it accept responsibility for future consequences?

  9. Does it have depth? Does it connect on more than one level? Does it appeal not only to people’s senses, but to their rational minds, their emotions, their associations, their sense of identity?

  10. Is it as simple as it should be? Have you eliminated all the unnecessary features, buttons, and colors? Stripped away the excess flourishes, surfaces, and angles? Removed gratuitous scenes, chapters, and symbols? Cut out extra steps, operations, and costs? This is not to say you need to strip out all the quirky details, but that any quirkiness should pull its weight.

  How much simplifying is right? It’s a question of informed intuition; you need to develop an eye for it. The best way to teach your intuition how to judge simplicity—and aesthetics in general—is the same way everyone makes good judgments. You compare. You consider the merits of one feature, or one solution, relative to another. You weigh the pros and cons, turning it in your hand to look at it from every angle. Without the ability to compare, you’re floating in the fog.

  Think of comparison as the “eye test” of aesthetic judgment. When you visit the optometrist to get your vision checked, you view the eye chart on the wall through a phoropter, a futuristic-looking machine that lets the doctor switch lenses in and out to find the optimum correction for each eye. With every change of lens he’ll ask, “Which looks sharper, this one...or this one?” Just when you think the letter Z looks pretty sharp, the next lens makes it look even sharpe
r. Without the benefit of comparison, you’d probably end up with a suboptimal pair of glasses.

  Most of us, given enough time and enough choices, will select for better aesthetics. But we don’t always have enough time or enough choices. We need to make decisions on the fly, without sufficient context.

  What gives professionals their value is experience—they’ve worked through so many situations that they’ve developed a repertoire of aesthetic choices. They don’t need as much time because they’ve already put in their time. The relevant options are hardwired into memory.

  Sell in, not out

  The same skill that allows professionals to make quick, intuitive judgments also creates a knowledge gap that gets in the way of broader adoption. Asymmetrical knowledge—a situation in which one person or group knows less about a subject than another person or group—creates fear in the first group and frustration in the second. This is because appreciating a new idea is a kind of journey. Those who’ve taken the journey, the innovators, forget that the others will need a little more time to catch up.

  Imagine being shown a map of the world, only upside down, and being told that this is how all maps will be displayed in the future. Even though you know it’s the same map you’ve seen a thousand times, it suddenly seems unfamiliar. It feels wrong, like your first day in a new school. It takes a bit of effort to accept the idea that Australia is “up over” instead of “down under.”