Ever been part of a project that was supposed to change everything? A grand, ambitious plan cooked up in a boardroom with a hundred-page blueprint, a multi-year timeline, and a budget that could fund a small country. Everyone’s excited. The PowerPoints are slick. The buzzwords are buzzing.
And then it launches. And it’s a spectacular disaster.
The website crashes. The software is a buggy mess. The new company-wide “one platform” is so complicated that nobody uses it. Everyone stands around wondering, “What went wrong? The plan was perfect!”
It’s a story as old as time, from failed government websites to startups that burn through millions building a “perfect” product that nobody wants. It feels like a cruel joke, but it’s not. There’s a hidden rule of the universe at play, a simple but brutal law that explains why big, complex dreams so often crash and burn.
It’s called Gall’s Law. And it’s the best argument you’ll ever hear for starting small and simple.
The Origin Story: A Doctor’s Diagnosis for Broken Systems
Our story doesn’t start in a Silicon Valley garage or a corporate strategy session. It starts with a pediatrician named Dr. John Gall. In his 1975 book, Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail, Gall made a profound observation not just about medicine, but about everything.
He noticed that the most complex and successful systems in the world, like the human body, weren’t designed in one go. They evolved. They started as simple, working systems (think single-celled organisms) and gradually became more complex over millions of years, adapting and solving problems along the way.
From this, he derived his famous law:
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”
In other words, you can’t just blueprint a masterpiece. You have to grow one. Trying to build a complex system from zero is like trying to build a 747 in your garage with no instructions. It’s just not gonna fly.
The Basic Explanation
Think of it like learning to surf.
You don’t start by trying to ride a 20-foot monster wave at Pipeline. You might have a perfect plan, the best board, the perfect stance you saw on YouTube, a vision of yourself carving down the face of the wave. But the second you hit the water, you’ll be instantly and violently humbled. The system is too complex, the variables (the water, the wind, your balance) too unpredictable.
Instead, you start with a simple system that works: catching a tiny, broken wave in the shallow white water. You get on a big, stable foam board and paddle clumsily. An instructor gives you a boost, and a one-foot wave pushes you five feet to the shore. You probably fall off, but for a second, you were moving. It worked.
From that simple, working system, you evolve. You learn to stand up, to turn slightly. You paddle out a bit further to catch a slightly bigger, unbroken wave. Each step adds a new layer of complexity, but it’s built on a foundation of something you could already do. Eventually, after countless iterations and failures, you might be ready for a bigger wave. You grew your skill from a simple system that was already functional.
Gall’s Law says that any other approach is doomed. If you paddle straight out to the big waves on day one, you’re just going to get crushed. You have to start with the simple, working system. The inter-dependencies are too many, the variables too vast. You can’t predict all the ways something will fail until it actually fails.
Gall’s Law in the Wild
Once you understand Gall’s Law, you see it as the ghost in the machine behind the biggest tech successes and failures of our time.
The Healthcare.gov Implosion: Remember the disastrous launch of the US healthcare marketplace in 2013? It was a textbook violation of Gall’s Law. A massive, hyper-complex system was designed from scratch by multiple contractors, with countless dependencies. On launch day, it crumbled. It couldn’t be “patched” to work; it had to be largely rebuilt, piece by piece, starting with the simple parts that worked.
The Rise of the World Wide Web: The web wasn’t designed to be the sprawling, chaotic, all-encompassing thing it is today. On day one researchers weren’t trying to live stream their takeout experience at Taco Bell. It started as a dead-simple system for scientists at CERN to share documents. It worked. It was simple. From there, it evolved, layer by layer, with new protocols (like images, then video) being added over decades. It grew organically from a simple, working system.
Every Successful Startup Ever: The entire concept of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is basically Gall’s Law in a business suit. Don’t spend two years building the “perfect” app with 100 features. Build the simplest possible version that solves one problem for one person. Get it out there. See if it works. If it does, evolve it based on what real users want. Facebook started as a simple “hot or not” for college kids. It worked. The rest is history.
How to Use Gall’s Law to Actually Get Things Done
So how do you avoid the trap of brilliant, complicated failure? You embrace the power of simple.
Step 1: Find the Simple, Working Core.
Whatever you’re trying to build, a new product, a new team workflow, a new morning routine, ask yourself: What is the absolute simplest version of this that could possibly work? Not the best version. Not the feature-rich version. The “it-doesn’t-fall-apart” version. Start there.
Step 2: Get It into the Real World.
Don’t hide in your lab perfecting it. A simple system that works in theory is still a theory. You need to expose it to the chaos of reality. Let real people use it, break it, and complain about it. Their feedback is the evolutionary pressure your system needs to survive.
Step 3: Evolve, Don’t Rebuild.
When a problem arises, resist the urge to scrap everything and start over with a new “perfect” plan. Instead, make the smallest possible change to solve the immediate problem. Iterate. Add one feature at a time. Let the system grow, don’t force it.
Step 4: Worship at the Altar of “Good Enough.”
The pursuit of perfection is the enemy of progress. A simple system that works today is infinitely more valuable than a complex, perfect system that might work tomorrow. Ship the thing that works, even if it’s ugly. You can make it pretty later.
The Bottom Line
Gall’s Law is a humbling reminder that we’re not as smart as we think we are. We can’t predict the endless complexities of the real world. The most successful and enduring systems aren’t born from a single stroke of genius; they are grown, patiently and painfully, from simple things that worked.
It’s a call to abandon our grand blueprints and embrace the messy, iterative process of evolution.
So the next time you’re tempted to design a perfect, all-encompassing solution, stop. Take a deep breath. And go build the simplest thing that could possibly work. Every masterpiece starts with a single stroke.
Named Law: Gall’s Law
Simple Definition: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work.
Origin: Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail by John Gall
Wikipedia: Gall’s Law
Category: Systems Theory, Product Management