Almost a followup to the recent post about removing complexity and keeping things simple: a recent post by Julia Evans (a software developer in Canada). She has a video and a transcript of a talk she gave entitled Making Hard Things Easy and makes a case that far too much knowledge is poorly documented and hard to understand. She's primarily talking about technical things, like the Bash Shell or DNS, but the main point is applicable to many other things in normal day to day life and work. This is why we write an "executive summary" on a report. We want to extract the important parts of a (possibly long and involved) document and present them in an easily digested list up front. Fundamentally, it is all about good communication.