Maeda's SIMPLICITY

The Subtlety Of Simplicity

Linda Tischler's article on simplicity for Fast Company is now visible online. Everyone wants more; everyone wants less. And everyone can't make up their mind. Thank goodness we're human like that.

I think while I was in Paris I had a brief moment of clarity. While watching a television program about the new French coach, Jean-Pierre Elissalde, of the Japan National Rugby Team things started to make sense. Apparently the Japanese team was once strong, but had fallen in recent times. Elissadle explained the team's fundamental problem -- that they were too predictable as they moved up the field. The ball was passed between team members with a mechanical accuracy that was easy for the opponents to predict, and thus consistently topple. Elissalde professed that the better way was what he called "to become like the bubbles in champagne." (Man, I love the French!) His metaphor described the way that bubbles float to the top in unexpected and fluid ways. In the same way, the Japanese team had to learn how to operate based upon their intuition versus their intellect. The ball needed to be passed between teammates in a fluid, realtime manner where all course corrections occured in zero-time.

It then dawned upon me that the intellectual approach to simplicity is to reduce details, whereas the intuitive approach to simplicity is to add subtlety. The beauty of subtlety is that it is usually weightless, hard-to-detect, and, by most accounts, invisible. In other words, it is the style of something gained from nothing. Thus we arrive at the eleventh law of simplicity:

I shall continue this thought after the holiday weekend. The holiday calls ...