Our preference as software developers and consultants is usually for simple and elegant solutions. Complexity is expensive, whether found in organizations, business logic or code. It is awesome when we abstract it away. Unfortunately, this often leads to the mindset that the problems themselves should not be complex, or that existing complex solutions are unnecessarily so. Worse, we often turn apathetic towards those do not share our aversion to complexity and cast them as part of the problem.
In this session, I will talk a bit about why I think we try so hard to make things simple, and try to convince you to adopt a "complex-until-proven-simple" approach to everything. I will make the case that this can help build personal confidence, promote empathy and lead to better results and happier clients, drawing on a variety of historical and modern examples from science, philosophy and technology.
