Tesler’s Law of Communication
Why Leaders Must Absorb Complexity
In product design, there is a fundamental principle known as Tesler’s Law, or the Law of Conservation of Complexity (see on the laws of UX). It states that every system has a baseline of complexity that cannot be destroyed—it can only be shifted.
As a designer or engineer, you face a choice: you can either force the user to navigate a complicated interface, or you can do the hard, invisible work behind the scenes to make the experience seamless.
Lately, I ran some thought experiments on what Tesler’s Law can teach us about effective communication, especially with your stakeholders and executives.
Because esp. now, in the abundance of generated content, too many leaders are pushing the complexity onto their CTOs and VPs.
Exposing the Wiring
My thoughts brought me back to 2019, my week in Silicon Valley. Me heading to Google I/O. Instead of enjoying the 7km walk in a new place, I wrote another email-essay to my CEO…
That day our mobile app was taken down from the Play Store due to a policy violation regarding private APIs. The fix itself was trivial: bump the SDK, use the newly exposed public API, and inform stakeholders about a temporary gap in processed data. It was perhaps one hour of work.
Yet, I wrote an essay-long deliberation to the CEO. I detailed the wrong architectural decision we had made a year prior. I explained how Google’s policies had shifted over time. I outlined how the Play Store linters now flag this specific violation. I added my personal thought process, interesting alternative ideas, and technical nuances.
I was trying to show up.
I wanted the executives to understand every single detail, step into my shoes, and reproduce the problem step by step. Deep down, I also wanted to dilute my responsibility for the mistake by drowning it in context, proving my professionalism by showing exactly how much I knew about the system that had just failed.
The CEO responded to my two-page essay with a single line:
“Mirek, you write too long emails.”
I was stunned. Did he really not care that our only app was missing from the store?
It took time to realize that → He wasn’t ignoring the crisis; he was rejecting the cognitive load I was trying to transfer to him.
If an executive has to reproduce your thought process step-by-step to understand a situation, why do they need you? Your role as a professional is not to flood leadership with context. It is to reduce, simplify, and provide just enough signal so a decision can be made.
The AI Generation Trap
Eight years ago, I treated writing as a craft. I loved shaping the narrative and presenting my way of thinking. Today, that dynamic has been completely inverted. With generative AI, everyone can produce polished, exhaustive text for a fraction of the cost in time and effort. Text has become a cheap commodity.
But the cost of reading has not changed.
Our human context window has not expanded. In fact, empirical data proves that as information volume increases, our cognitive bandwidth actively degrades. The numbers behind modern information overload are staggering:
Continuous Interruption: According to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, the average knowledge worker faces roughly 275 interruptions per day—about one every two minutes.
Work About Work: Asana reports that 60% of a knowledge worker’s time is now consumed by coordination, reading, and app-toggling, leaving only 40% for the skilled work they were actually hired to do.
When a manager hands an executive a massive AI-generated document, they are failing Tesler’s Law. They are offloading the complexity directly onto an already overloaded system.
They are being cheap with their own time and incredibly expensive with their stakeholder’s time.
Progressive Disclosure: Building the Clean Interface
To absorb the complexity, you have to design a clean interface for decision-making. In UX design, we use a concept called Progressive Disclosure—showing the user the simplest interface first, and hiding the complex features behind an “Advanced Settings” menu.
You should apply this exact concept to your communication. Give stakeholders the clean UI at the top, and put the complexity at the bottom.
A clean text interface contains exactly three things:
The Context (1 sentence): What is the exact problem?
The Impact (1 visual or sentence): Why does it matter right now?
The Ask or Action (1 sentence): What do you need them to approve, or what are you doing to fix it?
The adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” is literal here. When I led a mobile engineering team, instead of elaborating on auto-update behaviors (they stopped listening after 15 seconds), I just opened Mixpanel and took a screenshot of the nice S-curve showing the move from app v1.0.0 to v1.1.0 over the last 4 weeks. “This is how our adoption cycle looks”. No questions asked since then.
If you need and worry that stakeholders will miss critical context, use a Technical Appendix. Put executive summary at the top, draw a line, and dump your context, data, and thought process at the bottom (or link to a Confluence page). Y
ou aren’t deleting the context; you are just removing it from the critical path.
Alongside this framework, apply these rules of reduction:
Never say, “Here’s what ChatGPT says.” (I also hate getting such an answer…) An executive can prompt an LLM themselves. Your job is not to copy and paste AI outputs. Your job is to moderate, verify the logic, and separate the value from the fluff.
Apply the Fatigue Heuristic. If a document is so long that you are tired of reading it yourself before hitting send, it is too long. The reader will feel that friction tenfold.
Draft minus fifty percent. Stephen King notes in On Writing that his formula is Second Draft = First Draft - 10%. But King is a master of his craft. For those of us writing technical communications, our unedited thoughts are usually much noisier. Write the long, exhaustive thought process first to clear your head, but aim for a 50% reduction in your first round of edits. Brutally strip away the defensive posturing before you hit send.
State the decision and give the green light to yourself. Default to making your communication a no-op. Rather than asking “can I push this change on Monday?”, go with “I’m pushing on Monday, here’s rationale. Let me know if you want me to hold on". You will be surprised by how much you will move forward, and your boss will be thankful for not being engaged in every single decision.
The Hidden Variable: Trust
Ultimately, the reason we over-communicate isn’t just because we have the tools to do it; it’s because we lack trust. We think we need to prove our competence with word count. We believe that if we don’t show all our math, people will assume we didn’t do the work.
The opposite is true. Drowning an executive in details doesn’t signal competence; it screams anxiety. It says, “I don’t know what actually matters here, so I’m giving you everything.”
Conciseness builds trust.
When an executive sees a short, sharp message that distills a massive technical failure into a three-bullet decision matrix, the implicit message is clear: “I have this under control.”
As a builder or an engineer, you don’t expose the circuit boards to the end user to prove how hard you worked. You give them a finished, functional product. Apply that same standard to your communication. Do the hard cognitive work of synthesizing the complexity, so your stakeholders don’t have to.