1-2-3-4

Last minute, I had to get to Scotland. Three and a half hours on the road, arriving with trucks about to show up and a site full of things that needed shipping out. The person with the key, or the code, or even just an instruction, wasn't there. No note on the fence saying, here's your code, Jeroen. Just a locked gate, a bit of rain doing its best to look dramatic, and a schedule that wasn't going to wait for me to figure this out.

I looked at the lock, and for a second I nearly overthought it. Maybe there's an app. Maybe a QR code. Maybe some twenty-seven-step security process. Then I tried something else. I tried simple. One, two, three, four. Click. Lock open.

I had to laugh. We live in a world where we assume everything has to be complex, sophisticated, deeply engineered, before it can possibly be right. We're in an era where it feels like everything's already been invented, already been done, so the only direction left is further out, deeper in, more advanced. That instinct creates complexity for its own sake, and it's very often exactly the wrong direction.

It isn't really the technology's fault. It's how our own thinking gets trained. We dig, we analyse, we search for the clever formula, and we walk straight past the obvious one, simply because it feels too easy to be the right answer. That morning in Scotland, the obvious answer opened the lock, kept the trucks on schedule, and sorted the rest of the day in one click.

I don't think this is only true on a locked gate. I think it's true most places we've decided something must be complicated before we've actually tried the simple version first. Somewhere right now, you're probably circling an elaborate answer to something that might actually open with one, two, three, four, if you let it.