John Gall (1925-2014) was an American author, scholar, and pediatrician. Gall is known for his 1975 book ‘General Systemantics’ (republished two years later as ‘Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail’).
Gall’s Law is derived from Systemantics and states: ‘A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.’
This law is essentially an argument in favor of under-specification: it can be used to explain the success of systems like the World Wide Web and Blogosphere, which grew from simple to complex systems incrementally, and the failure of systems like CORBA, which began with complex specifications. Gall’s Law has strong affinities to the practice of agile software development.
Although the quote may seem to validate the merits of simple systems, it is preceded by a qualifier: ‘A simple system may or may not work’ This philosophy can also be attributed to extreme programming, which encourages doing the simplest thing first and adding features later.
Gall started his career in the 1960s as a practicing pediatrician in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and became part of the faculty of the University of Michigan. In 2001 he retired after more than 40 years of private practice. In the first decades of his practice he had also ‘conducted weekly seminars in Parenting Strategies for parents, prospective parents, medical students, nursing students, and other health care practitioners.’
Gall’s main research interest was the behavioral and developmental problems of children, on which subject he published several scientific papers and books. As a sideline he conducted more general research on the question of what makes systems work and fail. He collected and analyzed all kinds of examples of systems-failures, and generalized problems and pitfalls into a series of ‘Laws of Systems.’
In 1975 he published his systems research under the title General systemantics, republished two years later as Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail by Quadrangle, The New York Times Book Company. This work has been translated into Spanish, German, Hebrew, and Japanese.
In 2002 he published a third edition of Systemantics under the title ‘The Systems Bible.’ This work inspired many authors in the systems movement, such as scientists Mario Bunge (1979), Paul Watzlawick (1990) and Russell L. Ackoff (1999), and systems designers Ken Orr (1981) and Grady Booch (1991).
The Daily Omnivore 
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