It's Complicated

Liam walked into a client site with a problem nobody could crack. Twelve months of effort, no progress, and a manager asking why.

Then two different people described the same problem to him — one said complicated, the other said complex — and the entire thing came apart in his hands.

Most people use those two words interchangeably. They are not interchangeable. They describe fundamentally different classes of problem, and the methods that reliably solve one will reliably fail on the other. If you’ve ever sat in a room watching a team run the same play for a year with nothing to show for it, there’s a decent chance the problem was never the plan. It was the diagnosis.

This episode is about the framework that makes that distinction, and what happens when you start pointing it at everything.

We talk about:

• The Cynefin framework, its domains, and the fifth one in the middle that nobody mentions
• Bathtubs, swimming pools, and the ocean — why the same model breaks at different scales
• Known unknowns vs unknown unknowns, and why Matt doesn’t entirely buy that framing
• Why complicated problems need the right people in the room, and complex ones need small experiments instead
• How problems move between domains — and why that movement is the actual goal
• The difference between complexity and a complication (worked examples, including the boss’s son’s vendor)
• Monoliths, microservices, and why the obvious mapping is cruder than it looks
• What happens to a profession when its core work slides from complex, to complicated, to clear
• Where that leaves developers — and what we can still offer that the tooling can’t

Matt also admits to reading up on Cynefin a fortnight ago for entirely unrelated reasons, which is either uncanny timing or evidence that we share a brain. Neither option is reassuring.

Also: ADAConf is coming up. Matt will be there volunteering, wearing the glasses and the shirt, handing out stickers. Liam will not, which he is appropriately sour about.

🏷️ Listener discount: Use “BDD15” at the checkout for a 15% discount

Matt — Aldi scotch 🥃 (the decent stuff ran out and there’s no resupply until Christmas) Liam — Duty-free bottle picked up flying back from New Zealand, bought while the Australian dollar was behaving itself

• The Cynefin Framework — Dave Snowden’s framework, originally developed at IBM
• The Phoenix Project — Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford
• The Goal — Eliyahu Goldratt, where the Theory of Constraints comes from
• Thinking in Systems — Donella Meadows (stocks, flows, feedback loops)
• The Art of Problem Solving — our earlier episode, where Liam flagged this distinction and didn’t have the answer yet
• The John Carmack email episode — inlining vs abstraction, and two opposite routes to the same simplicity
• ADAConf — Melbourne, and yes we really are that fond of it
• Auphonic — the audio tool that makes editing this a simple problem (thanks Brandon Minnick)

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Cheers! 🍻