What is
complex work?

Put simply, complex work is work that’s hard to categorise, describe, or name.The real question is, why is it so hard to talk about?

When smart people work on difficult problems or creative people express themselves freely, they make things that don’t easily fit into words. Maybe these things assume a genuinely new form that people haven’t seen before, like a novel work of art. Or perhaps they’re very complicated, with many parts that are difficult to synthesize, like the service offerings of an international climate NGO. Or sometimes, they’re both complicated and new, like a new AI product or a digital twin, a living, real-time model of a physical system.

But despite these challenges, we still talk about complex work. 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 to sell them.

Sometimes, we talk about complex work in technical language, because even if we don’t have words for the thing itself, we can still talk about its parts and how we built it. Technical language 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 trying to name complex work. Who can blame us? We worked so hard to make it. And so we end up using abstract or generic language to talk about it, language that the outside world understands, but doesn’t really say much, let alone come close to saying what our work really is.

And at other times still, we adapt. We develop new language to better describe what we’re looking at, 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 they don’t.

Technical language, abstract and generic language, new language. These are three 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 an international NGO. And they all fail to describe complex work to outsiders, either through insider language or outsider generalities that say nothing precise at all.

For funders or the public, talking about complex work with outsiders often requires an outsider 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 these audiences, to be sure, but an outside perspective is just as important: beyond the workshop and its insider language.

And there’s another upshot to clarifying complex work this way. When we look at it 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 better develops on the inside, too.