If their products weren’t simple and easy to understand – they would quickly become obsolete in combat conditions and thus worthless. The theater of war (for which Lockheed’s products were designed) would not allow for more than that. He told the designers at Lockheed that whatever they made had to be something that could be repaired by a man in a field with some basic mechanic’s training and simple tools. Kelly explained the idea to others with a simple story. There’s really not much more to say here is there? Keep it simple stupid. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 It is worth noting that Kelly’s version of the phrase had no comma and was written “keep it simple stupid”.Īuthor/Copyright holder: Terretta. The phrase “keep it simple, stupid” is thought to have been coined by the late Kelly Johnson, who was the lead engineer at the Lockheed Skunk Works (a place responsible for the S-71 Blackbird spy plane amongst many other notable achievements). The simpler the explanation and the simpler the product, the more likely it is that the output will be useful to others. They care about being able to take that person’s output and make it useful to their own lives. And remember, complex, stupid ideas are so much harder to track down and kill.It was Albert Einstein who said “If you can’t explain it, you don’t understand it well enough.” Though it is often mis-reported as being “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it well enough.” What Einstein was driving at was a particular application of “keep it simple, stupid”.įrom scientific concepts to products the end-user doesn’t care how clever the creator or designer of something is. Sure, simple, stupid ideas need to be rubbished, but so do complex, stupid ideas. In short, Simple Smart ideas need to be accepted as possible, in fact, they need to be accepted as the best possible type of ideas. It’s like there is some maligning, black force in the world that destroys simplicity as soon as it comes in contact with criticism, adding detail and complexity until what was once beautiful, now just needs to be killed. Y ”, but will I will personally shout a round for every time I hear “that’s too complex, ditch the appendices, rewrite the report and come back with something more simple”. I often hear “that’s too simplistic, you haven’t included the effects of xxx or the works of Dr. However, an extremely simple solution is often considerably harder to envision but easy to ridicule. I think that KISS needs to be recognised as Keep It Simple and Smart, and kept as far away from stupidity as possible, if the principle is to be realised.įrom my point of view, it’s easy to create a complex, detailed solution, but very hard to check it for accuracy. It is common for an engineering argument to revolve around complex discussions of minute detail, and there is a general scepticism of anything that doesn’t come with at least 200 pages of appendices. However, in my job I keep running into the perception that simple IS stupid, and it’s caused me to doubt this saying, at least in its common format. There is a well known saying, “keep it simple, stupid!”.