KISS in Crisis: Stress and Decision Making

Maybe someone’s told you to “keep it simple, stupid.” Perhaps not your politest colleague, but they sure got the point across. The point being: the simpler the output, the more likely it is to be used. That’s the essence of the design principle KISS.

KISS is said to have originated with spy plane engineer, Kelly Johnson, who would tell his teams that their designs needed to be simple enough to be easily repaired by pretty much any mechanic in times of war. If the designs weren’t easy to comprehend, the planes themselves would be rendered worthless.

This emphasis on simple design came out of the military for obvious reasons. For one, war constitutes a semi- permanent state of crisis. In crisis, we’d simply rather not have to deal with too many extraneous variables when we’re making decisions. And that’s because stress already affects our capacity to make crisis decisions – and not in the good way.