Morgan Housel once wrote:
“Complexity gives the impression of control, while simplicity is hard to distinguish from cluelessness.”
That line made me think about what goes wrong in negotiations.
When a dispute escalates, complexity feels comforting. Long affidavits. Detailed chronologies. Spreadsheets with lots of calculations. Submissions footnoted into submission.
It feels like progress. It feels like rigour. It feels like control.
But often, it is theatre.
Complexity creates the appearance of command over uncertainty. If the problem is layered enough, technical enough, dense enough, it feels like we’ve done something. We’ve built a structure. We’ve constructed a case.
The difficulty is that disputes are rarely complex at their core.
They are usually about three simple questions:
- What happened?
- What does it cost?
- What will it take to move on?
Simplicity in answering those questions can look naïve. It can look underdone. It can feel exposed. There is nowhere to hide.
That’s why it’s hard.
In mediation, the work is often subtractive, not additive. We are not trying to produce the most sophisticated narrative. We are trying to strip the dispute back to its load-bearing beams.
And that can be uncomfortable.
Because when you reduce a matter to its essentials, you also reduce the room for ego, for posturing, for the illusion that more material equals more leverage.
The other side rarely concedes because the argument was better documented. They move — when they move — because the risk became clear. Because the cost of continuing finally outweighed the cost of stopping.
That is a problem that complexity cannot solve.
Resolution usually turns on clarity.
Clarity about risk.
Clarity about cost.
Clarity about time.
Clarity about what happens if this doesn’t settle.
The paradox is that the simpler the framing, the harder it is to dismiss.
A direct proposal, stripped of ornament, can feel unsophisticated. But it forces the real question:
Is this number within the range of reality?
Once that question is answered honestly, much of the noise falls away.
Litigation rewards complexity. It measures it in pages, authorities, and billable hours.
Mediation rewards something different.
It rewards the discipline to say — whether you’re a lawyer preparing your client or an executive deciding how much this fight is worth:
Here is the risk. Here is the cost of certainty. Here is the price of closure.
That kind of simplicity is not naïve. It is deliberate.
And in a world where disputes tend to grow in layers, the ability to simplify may be the closest thing to control that actually exists.
If you’re ready to simplify a dispute, contact me to learn more or book a mediation session.
