What is
complex work?

Put simply, complex work is work that’s hard to talk about.The real question is, why?

When smart people work on difficult problems or express themselves freely, they make things that don’t easily fit into words. Maybe these things assume a genuinely new form, like a novel work of art. Or perhaps they’re very complicated, with many difficult to synthesise parts, like the service offerings of an international NGO. Or sometimes they’re both complicated and new, like a large language model.

Complex work is hard to talk about. But we still do it. A lot. Because while it would be nice if our creations spoke for themselves, we need to talk about them to share our understanding, persuade others of their importance, and sell them.

We often talk about complex work in technical language, because even if we lack words for the work itself, we can still talk about its parts and how we built it. Using technical language for complex work is a bit like trying to describe a forest from the inside. We say a lot about the trees, even explain how they were grown. But we aren’t naming the forest itself.

Other times, we give up on really trying to talk about complex work. Who can blame us? We worked so hard to make it. And so we end up using abstract or generic language, language that the outside world understands, but really doesn’t say much, let alone anything about our work.

At other times still, we adapt. We develop new language to better describe our complex work, and we talk to each other in this language, reinforcing its naturalness. Engaged deeply, we start to take our assumptions for granted, and talk as if the world understands us. Which unfortunately, it doesn’t.

Technical language, abstract and generic language, new language. These are the common ways we talk about complex work, whether it’s site-specific contemporary art, a new AI data-scraping API, or the multifaceted services of a climate NGO. And they all fail to describe the work to outsiders, either by using insider language, or outsider generalities that say nothing precise at all.

To really talk about complex work with an outside audience, it helps to have an outside perspective itself. That’s why I started Clarity for Complex Work. People doing complex work need someone who can see intensely what they do as a whole and describe it precisely, clearly, and persuasively for their audience. Whatever the work — in tech, NGOs, or the art world — the need is the same. You need to know your audience, to be sure, but a clear, insightful outside perspective is arguably even more important: a perspective outside the workshop and its insider language.

And there’s another upshot to clarifying complex work this way. When we look at work from the outside and describe it in clear and persuasive terms, we not only sell it better to an external audience, we understand it better ourselves. We see clearly what our work really is, as a whole. And that has consequences not only for how we move it into the world, but for how it develops on the inside, too.