Run the Room

The difference between simple and easy.

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Everyone with a keyboard has had opinion on foreign aid over the last 18 months.

And lately, those opinions have been converging on one word:

Simple.

Cut the overhead, skip the systems, hand out stuff you can count. And I get the appeal—simple is legible, simple is fundable, and simple photographs well.

But here's the problem:

We often confuse choosing a simpler problem with making the solution easier.
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And simplifying the wrong thing can make a hard problem impossible to solve.

Take health:

The biggest provider of healthcare in most poor countries is the government. So if you want to improve healthcare at scale, eventually you have to do the deeply unsexy work of getting governments to support millions of health workers, fund them, train them, manage them, and keep them in the system.

There is nothing simple about that.

So we tried to shrink the problem to make it simple:

In 1979, a year after 134 countries committed to health for all, two researchers argued that solving the full problem was unaffordable. Instead, they proposed an interim strategy: weigh the babies, treat diarrhoea, encourage breastfeeding, vaccinate.

Simple to fund, simple to count. And to be fair, it worked. Those interventions saved lives.

But the interim never really ended. And the opportunity cost was high:

Money tends to follow what it can easily attribute, so this approach repeatedly built short-term programs and parallel structures around the existing health system rather than doing the harder work of strengthening the system itself.

In Uganda, after roughly a billion dollars of aid spending, researchers concluded that the effort had failed to strengthen the health system it was working inside.

Over and over, health systems became stacks of donor programs in a trench coat. We confused choosing simpler problem simpler with making hard problems easier.

Brazil took a different path. It put health workers on the public payroll, permanently, inside the system rather than in a short-term program alongside it.

That meant constitutional reform, a decade of municipal negotiation, and a permanent line in the national budget. The type of work that photographs terribly—and lasts for decades.

Because once it was built, nobody had to come back every three years and convince someone to fund it again.

The same principle applies to every sector:
​Simplicity is a property of the problem.
Ease is a property of the doing.

The goal isn't to choose a simpler problem because the hard one scares us.

The goal is to take the hard problem as given, then make the path through it easier.

Reduce the time it takes.
Reduce the political capital it requires.
Reduce the number of people who have to say yes.
Reduce the friction until doing the right thing becomes the default.

Until, eventually, the hard thing is easy enough to get done.

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​Try this

Look at your own work. Is it simple because you found a smarter way through the problem? Or is it simple because you removed the part that was hardest to solve?

What would change if you stopped simplifying the problem and started making the path easier?

🌿 Don't make the problem smaller. Make the path easier.