The power of basics

Big topic!
I was inspired by an edition of the Harvard Business Ideacast I listed to this week. It's here.
Basic concept is one that I share with Greg Unruh. When looking to solve some problem, look at how nature solves it, and find / devise an analogue. It's very much worth a listen for the concepts of economic impacts and sustainability. But for this post I key in on a simple concept which Greg opens with. He describes and observation that, in nature, most of everything we see and "are" come from 4 basic elements. So out of the whole periodic table, only 4 elements are combined, decay, and recombine into the multitude of organic forms on earth ( and elsewhere ). I immediately thought of how most rock and blues is composed from 3 or 4 basic chords.
That same night, my guitar teacher, out of the blue ( no pun ) mentioned a funny video he saw by the Axis of Awesome, in which that band played through 35 pop songs using 4 chords, and never varied the progression.
It'll be interesting to keep this concept in mind and see how widely it applies. In IT we frequently bring up the KISS principal. ( Keep it simple, stupid! ). Hard to do when technologies don't blend well, new ones come out each day, and our tasks revolve around rapid integration rather than elegant ( sustainable ), rationalized creation.