Design is Decision: an essay based on Epicurus' paradox.
- Igor Baliberdin
- Feb 2
- 9 min read
How ancient philosophy illuminates the contemporary trilemma between cost, complexity, and results, and why organizational maturity lies in accepting trade-offs, not avoiding them.
Introduction: The Paradox That Spans Millennia
Sometime in the 4th century BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus formulated one of the most enduring paradoxes in the Western tradition. Preserved by Lactantius in De Ira Dei (On the Wrath of God), the argument questions the coexistence of three divine attributes:
“God either wants to eliminate evils and cannot, or can and does not want to, or neither wants to nor can, or both wants and can. If He wants and cannot, He is impotent—which contradicts the nature of God. If He can and does not want to, He is malevolent—which is equally contrary to God. If He neither wants nor can, He is both malevolent and impotent, and therefore not God. If He wants and can—the only option compatible with divine nature—where do evils come from, and why does He not remove them?”
The paradox is not a refutation of God’s existence, but a demonstration that certain attributes, when positioned simultaneously, generate irresolvable structural tensions. It is a lesson about the limits of systems—even theological ones.
In contemporary design, we face a structurally analogous trilemma: cost, complexity, and outcome. As in the philosophical paradox, the attempt to maximize all three dimensions at once leads to practical contradictions. We want excellence with reduced budgets and low complexity—an ideal that, in most contexts, does not hold up in reality.
That is why saying design is decision is not motivational rhetoric. It is an acknowledgment that every system operates under constraints, and that strategic management inevitably means accepting conscious trade-offs.
The Fallacy of Managerial Omnipotence
Epicurus teaches us that certain systems impose unavoidable limits. In design, this system is woven from budget, time, technology, team capacity, and competitive dynamics. Wanting an exceptional outcome with minimal investment and a simplistic solution to an intrinsically complex problem is the managerial equivalent of demanding that a deity be simultaneously omnipotent, benevolent, and untouched by evil—an expectation that ignores the laws of operational reality.
Richard Buchanan, in his seminal article “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking” (1992), argues that design problems are wicked problems—complex, ill-defined problems with no single solution or clear criteria for resolution. These problems do not allow for the simultaneous optimization of all variables. Each decision reveals new ramifications; each solution generates new questions.
The issue, therefore, is not whether constraints will exist, but which constraints will be strategic and which will remain unexamined impositions. Mature design is the governance of priorities: the deliberate exercise of choosing where to invest energy, where to accept compromises, and where to uphold non-negotiable standards.
Organizations operating under the fallacy of managerial omnipotence believe that “working harder” or “being more agile” is enough to transcend structural trade-offs. The result is team exhaustion, talent turnover, and the delivery of mediocre products that fully satisfy no priority.
Strategic Dissonance: Where Discourse and Decision Diverge
Consider an organization that declares, in its stated values, a commitment to excellence in customer experience. Yet this same organization:
Allocates no budget for qualitative user research
Allows no iteration time in the product roadmap
Rejects challenges to business assumptions raised by the design team
Defines success exclusively by delivery speed, not by measurable impact
This organization lives in what we might call strategic dissonance: the misalignment between what is declared on corporate slides and what is actually decided in the resource-allocation spreadsheet.
In Epicurus’s paradox, this organization would be the deity who “wants to eliminate evil but cannot.” The discourse signals ambition; the decision structure reveals limitation. In this scenario, design does not fail primarily due to technical incapacity—though technical shortcomings may coexist. It fails because decisional misalignment makes it impossible to translate intention into outcome.
Marty Cagan, in Inspired (2017), argues that product failure is rarely technical—it is strategic. Product teams fail when there is no clarity about which problem they are solving, for whom, and why. Without this clarity, every design choice becomes arbitrary, and the result is merely a reflection of systemic incoherence.
Strategic dissonance is particularly insidious because it allows organizations to maintain a narrative of commitment to quality while systematically disinvesting in the mechanisms that produce it. It is a form of institutional self-sabotage.
Complexity: Essential vs. Accidental—and the Money Left on the Table
Another common misalignment arises when there is financial willingness to invest, but organizational resistance to confronting the structural density of the problem. Here, it is crucial to distinguish between two types of complexity—a distinction originally articulated by Fred Brooks in “No Silver Bullet” (1986):
Essential Complexity
This is inherent to the problem being solved. Healthcare systems involve multiple actors (patients, physicians, insurers, regulators), intertwined regulations, unpredictable clinical variables, and often conflicting expectations. Financial platforms operate under complex regulatory frameworks, multidimensional security risks, and non-linear user behaviors.
This complexity cannot be “solved”—only understood, organized, and translated into systems that make it manageable. Artificially simplifying this reality does not resolve the challenge; it merely conceals it until it resurfaces as an operational crisis or systemic failure.
Accidental Complexity
This is generated by inefficient processes, obsolete technologies, organizational silos, or dysfunctional political structures. It is complexity that adds no value—a channel of systemic waste through which money drains without producing results.
For example, an organization that maintains three non-integrated legacy CRM systems, forcing teams to manually reconcile data, is not dealing with essential business complexity—it is accumulating technical and organizational debt.
Eliminating this complexity requires confronting cultural conflicts, redesigning processes, and often making difficult decisions about people, technologies, and power.
Accidental complexity is not a design challenge—it is a symptom of managerial neglect. And every day it persists represents wasted money, time, and cognitive energy.
Strong outcomes rarely emerge from simplistic solutions applied to essentially complex problems. Essential complexity is not the enemy of design; it is the raw material that must be understood, organized, and translated. Denying it does not reduce the challenge—it only postpones the crisis.
Priority governance in Practice: The Gov.br Case
Theory is useful; concrete examples are essential. Consider Gov.br, Brazil’s unified digital public services platform, launched in 2020.
The project could have pursued a superficial solution—a basic portal digitizing PDF forms. That would have been the low-cost, low-complexity choice. But the essential complexity of the problem involved:
Integrating legacy systems from dozens of federal, state, and municipal agencies, each with different technological architectures
Serving citizens with vastly different levels of digital literacy, from highly connected urban users to rural populations with intermittent internet access
Ensuring accessibility for people with disabilities in a country where this had historically not been a priority
Functioning on precarious technological infrastructure, including low-end mobile devices
The government’s decision was to confront this complexity head-on, investing in:
API-based federated system architecture
User-centered design with extensive research and testing cycles
Integrated governance across multiple ministries and secretariats
Scalable infrastructure capable of handling millions of simultaneous accesses
The cost was high. The timeline was long. Political coordination was Herculean. But the outcome was transformative: by 2024, the platform had over 150 million users and more than 4,000 integrated digital services.
Gov.br’s success was not merely technical—it was the political courage to choose the harder, but correct, path. It was the refusal to accept the fallacy that excellence can be delivered with low investment and simplistic solutions.
This case illustrates that priority governance is not a theoretical abstraction. It is the deliberate practice of repeatedly answering:
Where should complexity be embraced because it generates competitive advantage or public value?
Where does cost represent strategic investment rather than avoidable expense?
What truly defines a good outcome in this specific context?
Design as strategic leadership
To say that design is decision is to recognize that the value of design lies not only in what is created, but fundamentally in what is deliberately chosen not to be done. A good outcome is not the absence of cost or complexity, but their intentional alignment, mediated by a lucid understanding of what truly matters.
Jon Kolko, in “Design Thinking Comes of Age” (Harvard Business Review, 2015), argues that design has matured from an aesthetic discipline into one of strategic thinking. The contemporary designer is not merely someone who executes solutions—but someone who illuminates the tensions organizations prefer to keep in the shadows, forcing a collision between the priority declared on the slide and the real decision made in the spreadsheet.
When design operates at this level, it ceases to be mere technical execution and becomes strategic leadership. This means:
Making visible the tensions others prefer to ignore
Forcing difficult conversations about real versus declared priorities
Taking responsibility for the implications of each choice
Anticipating the consequences of trade-offs before they manifest as crises
Design does not resolve paradoxes by eliminating tensions. It resolves them by making trade-offs transparent and consequences anticipatable. It is in this lucid, responsible, and deeply strategic act that design establishes itself as the discipline of thought that governs how organizations transform intention into reality.
Conclusion: the courage to decide
Epicurus’s paradox has remained unresolved for more than two millennia because it touches on fundamental contradictions about the nature of reality and power. The paradox of design, however, can be confronted in every project, every choice, every moment an organization decides with clarity what truly matters.
There is no magic formula that dissolves the trilemma between cost, complexity, and outcome. There is no agile method sophisticated enough, no design framework comprehensive enough, and no technological tool powerful enough to optimize all variables simultaneously.
There is only the courage to decide.
Consider the case of Rede Globo in 2018. The challenge was to create a platform that expressed the scale and significance of the Globo brand while becoming an internal reference for the design team—under a critical timeline that seemed incompatible with the level of quality required. The core decision was clear: how could a high-quality experience be delivered without compromising usability, aesthetics, and brand consistency?
The organization could have chosen the seemingly safer path: extending the deadline, inflating the budget, or settling for a mediocre solution that “solved the problem” without confronting its essential complexity. Instead, the decision was to completely redesign the experience and decision-making system through a unified platform, where design would structure, preserve, and distribute the brand’s visual identity within a single digital environment.
Rede Globo's project scheeshot
The outcome validated that decisional courage: more than 20,000 accesses in the first hours after launch, a platform twenty times faster than previous ones, and 92% effectiveness with centralized resources. But the real success was not found in the numbers alone—it was in the clarity of priorities that made it possible to consciously manage the trade-offs between speed, quality, and complexity.
This case illustrates what organizational maturity in design truly means: not avoiding trade-offs, but managing them deliberately. The courage to confront essential complexity rather than deny it. The courage to invest where it is strategic, even when it is costly. The courage to say no when the alternative is incoherence. The courage to make explicit what is implicit, bringing to the surface tensions that everyone feels but few name.
At its highest level, design is the discipline that makes this possible—not as isolated technical execution, but as a governance system that transforms fragmented decisions into coherent strategy. It enables an organization to look at an apparently unsolvable trilemma—critical deadlines, exceptional quality, systemic complexity—and respond not with naïve optimism or paralyzing cynicism, but with lucid decision architecture.
Epicurus’s paradox teaches us that some tensions are structural and permanent. The Rede Globo case shows that structural tensions are not obstacles to excellence, but the very conditions under which excellence emerges.
References and further reading
Leituras Complementares:
Rittel, H. & Webber, M. (1973). “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning”. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155–169. Origem do conceito de wicked problems.
Dorst, K. (2011). “The Core of ‘Design Thinking’ and Its Application”. Design Studies, 32(6), 521–532. Análise crítica do design thinking como framework estratégico.
Vianna, M. et al. (2012). Design Thinking: Inovação em Negócios. MJV Press. Perspectiva brasileira sobre aplicação estratégica de design.
Lactantius (c. 250–325 d.C.). De Ira Dei (On the Anger of God). A formulação clássica do paradoxo de Epicuro é preservada nesta obra apologética cristã. Para tradução comentada: Hyman, A., & Walsh, J. J. (1973). Philosophy in the Middle Ages. Hackett Publishing.
Buchanan, R. (1992). “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking”. Design Issues, 8(2), 5–21. Artigo fundamental que transporta o conceito de “wicked problems” de Rittel & Webber (planejamento urbano) para o design. Disponível em: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1511637
Norman, D. (2013). The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition. Basic Books. Discussão sobre como sistemas mal projetados refletem falhas sistêmicas, não individuais.
Cagan, M. (2017). Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love. Wiley. Capítulos sobre alinhamento estratégico e o papel de liderança de produto.
Brooks, F. (1986). “No Silver Bullet — Essence and Accident in Software Engineering”. IEEE Computer, 20(4), 10–19. A distinção entre complexidade essencial e acidental, originalmente aplicada à engenharia de software, tornou-se referência transversal em design de sistemas.
Decreto nº 9.756/2019, publicado em 11 de abril de 2019, estabeleceu o prazo de 31 de dezembro de 2020 para migração de 1.600 sites federais à plataforma Gov.br. A primeira etapa operacional ocorreu em 31 de julho de 2019. SERPRO (2021). “Conheça os desafios de desenvolver uma das maiores plataformas de governo digital do mundo”. Disponível em: https://www.serpro.gov.br/menu/noticias/noticias-2021/desafio-serpro-desenvolver-govbr
Dados oficiais do Ministério da Gestão e da Inovação em Serviços Públicos (MGI): 167 milhões de usuários cadastrados (maio/2025) e 12.727 serviços (4.500 federais + 8.227 de 16 estados, junho/2025). Fontes: Agência Gov (junho/2025) e Mobile Time (maio/2025). ↩ ↩2
Kolko, J. (2015). “Design Thinking Comes of Age”. Harvard Business Review, September 2015. O artigo argumenta que design amadureceu de disciplina focada em estética para ferramenta estratégica organizacional: “There’s a shift under way in large organizations, one that puts design much closer to the center of the enterprise. But the shift isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about applying the principles of design to the way people work.” Disponível em: https://hbr.org/2015/09/design-thinking-comes-of-age
Case Rede Globo. Looop Design + Business (2018). Desafio: criar plataforma que expressasse a grandeza da marca em prazo crítico sem comprometer qualidade. Solução: redesign do sistema de experiência por meio de plataforma unificada. Resultados: +20.000 acessos nos primeiros 5 minutos; plataforma 20× mais rápida; +92% de efetividade com recursos centralizados. Disponível em: http://www.looop.com.br/cases
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