It's not complicated. It's complex.

I often hear people say, sometimes rather condescendingly, “It's not complicated,” or “You're overcomplicating things.”

I heard a version of it again recently, in a conversation with a long-time friend. We were wondering why Nigeria's art market hadn't developed to the point where art could be treated more widely as an investable asset class, as it is in some established markets. Something you can value, insure, borrow against and sell with confidence.

The answers seemed obvious. More auctions. Proper valuations. Get the banks involved. It's not complicated.

But the more we talked, the clearer it became that every one of those answers depends on the others. Banks won't lend without trusted valuations. Valuations need public price data. Public price data needs buyers who trust the market enough to buy in the open. Fix any one of them in isolation, and the others hold it in place.

That conversation wasn't really about art. It was about something I keep running into: we often mistake problems that are complex for problems that are merely complicated. That matters, because the way we solve one is not the way we should approach the other.

How we are taught to solve problems

Consider how most of us are taught to solve problems.

We observe a situation and break it down into its constituent parts. We examine each component, identify what isn't working and fix it. Then we bring everything back together and expect the whole to work as it should.

Analysis, followed by synthesis.

It is a powerful way of thinking. It has given us extraordinary advances in science, engineering, medicine and technology. When a problem is complicated, it works remarkably well.

But what happens when it doesn't?

What happens when we understand the individual parts of a problem, perhaps even fix them, and the overall problem stays exactly where it was?

Complicated vs complex

A complicated problem may have many moving parts, but the relationship between cause and effect can be worked out. A jet engine is complicated. With the right expertise, you can take it apart, find the fault, fix it and put it back together, and it will work.

A complex problem behaves differently. Its behaviour emerges from the interaction of its parts, and those parts have their own motivations, dependencies and capacity to adapt. Their relationships change over time. Intervene in one part, and the others change how they behave.

You are no longer fixing a collection of separate problems. You are dealing with a living system of relationships, feedback and adaptation.

This isn't my distinction. Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework set it out formally decades ago. But I first met the idea, in a different form, almost 30 years ago. One of my favourite courses during my first degree was Problem Structuring and Solving, taught by Con Connell, now Emeritus Professor. It's the course that first made me see that before you solve a problem, you have to decide what kind of problem it is. Get that wrong, and even a brilliant answer will fail.

Analysis doesn't become irrelevant when a problem is complex. It becomes even more important. But on its own it isn't enough if it ignores the relationships between the parts, and how those relationships change in response to what we do.

The moving bottleneck

Readers of this series will know my argument: markets form when five constraints — Understanding, Access, Trust, Momentum and Coordination — stop blocking participation. And they behave like a moving bottleneck. Solve one, and another becomes more important.

That is complexity. I just hadn't called it that.

The Dangote Refinery IPO showed this dynamic in real time. Access was dramatically widened: people could subscribe through phones, apps and other digital channels, with a minimum investment of just ₦5,250. But the response exposed another constraint. Some platforms buckled under the surge in demand. The infrastructure and coordination needed to support participation at that scale had not all caught up. And as the offer drew in first-time investors, questions about applications, allotment and the scams that shadow any oversubscribed offer made Trust matter more, not less.

The intervention had changed the conditions of the market. But in doing so, it exposed other constraints that had previously been less visible. The bottleneck moved.

You can't copy-paste a system

It's also why successful solutions can't always be transplanted.

M-Pesa in Kenya was built to make microfinance loan repayments easier. Kenyans had other ideas. They started using it to send money to family and friends, and Safaricom followed them. The users redesigned the product. The market grew out of the way people used it, the trust they placed in it, the agent network behind it and the businesses that gradually joined in.

Nigeria had the same technology and, for years, very different results. The regulators, the banks, the agent networks and the incentives were all different. Same parts, different relationships, different market.

The technology was never the whole answer. The system it operated in mattered.

So how do we approach complex problems?

I think the starting point is a different kind of humility: accepting that we won't have all the answers before we begin.

Instead of designing the complete solution in advance, we form hypotheses, test them, watch what happens and adapt. We study the relationships, incentives and behaviours that connect the parts, not just the parts themselves. We stay willing to learn from unintended consequences, and to abandon an approach that looked entirely logical when considered in isolation.

This is why our own diagnostic ends in a prediction rather than a plan — registered in advance, with the condition that would prove it wrong. A fixed protocol for reading a system you cannot fully predict is not a contradiction. It is the only honest way to find out whether you read it correctly.

It also takes imagination. When the existing relationships in a system keep reproducing the same outcomes, improving the components won't be enough. We may need to create new relationships, bring in new participants, or change the incentives that hold the system together.

The challenge is not always to understand the parts better. They may be perfectly understandable on their own. The real challenge is to understand the relationships between them, and to recognise that changing those relationships may be the only way to get a different outcome.

That's not overcomplicating things. That's taking the problem seriously.

Who does this work?

Which raises the bigger question.

If so many of the markets we're trying to build — in investing, pensions, the creative industries and beyond — are complex rather than complicated, are we developing the people equipped to build them?

Not just analysts, though we need rigour. Not just creatives, though we need imagination. We need people who can move between the two: who can understand a system without losing sight of the humans in it, and design interventions that let new relationships, opportunities and markets emerge.

I believe that's a discipline in its own right. Market formation.

And we need a lot more people practising it.

My friend and I never did solve the art market. But we stopped looking for the one thing to fix, which is a better place to start.