The cost of overcomplication.

No organisation sets out to become complicated. It happens one sensible decision at a time.

A project goes wrong, so a new approval step is added. A risk surfaces, so a new policy is written. A team grows, so a new layer of management appears to coordinate it. A board asks a hard question, so a new report is created to answer it next time. Each of these is reasonable. Each solves a real problem. And not one of them is ever removed.

This is how complexity works. It doesn’t arrive in a single bad strategy or a doomed acquisition. It accumulates - quietly, additively, and with the best of intentions - until one day the organisation that was built to do something is mostly busy operating itself.

Complexity accumulates one sensible decision at a time

The reason it only ever grows is that adding and removing carry wildly different risks for the person doing them. Add a control, a check, a sign-off, and you are visibly being responsible; if anything ever goes wrong, you are covered. Remove one, and you have personally taken on the downside. If the thing you simplified later fails, the failure has your name on it. So the safe move, every time, is to add. Multiply that incentive across thousands of decisions and hundreds of people over years, and you get an organisation that has been quietly optimising for the appearance of diligence rather than the speed of getting anything done.

It turns out this isn’t only an organisational habit; it’s a human one. When researchers give people a problem to fix, they reliably reach for what they can add and overlook what they could take away - even when removing would be simpler and better. We are, it seems, wired to build rather than strip back. Organisations are just that instinct handed a budget and a few decades to compound.

The cost hides in the gaps

The cost of all this is real, but it hides well, because no single piece of it looks like the problem. The extra approval adds two days. The extra meeting takes an hour. The extra report consumes an afternoon. The extra hand-off introduces one more chance for something to be lost. Individually, trivial. Collectively, they become drag - the invisible force that turns a decision that should take a morning into one that takes a month, and an organisation that should feel fast into one where everything is somehow an effort. Nobody can quite point to where the energy goes. It goes into the machine.

And drag is not just slowness; in a world that moves quickly, it is the thing that stops you responding at all. By the time an overcomplicated organisation has noticed a shift, routed the question through its layers, convened the right people, and produced the deck, the moment it was responding to has usually passed. The market does not wait for your process. Complexity, in the end, is latency - the gap between the world changing and you being able to do anything about it. The more complicated you are, the longer that gap, and the more of the future happens without you.

The people who can see it often go quiet

There is a cost that rarely makes it onto any dashboard, too. Talented people do not join an organisation to navigate it. They join to do work that matters - and overcomplication is the steady, demoralising experience of being kept from doing it well by the very place that hired you to do it. The best people feel this most acutely, because they can see most clearly the gap between what they could be doing and what the system allows. Some of them say so. Most of them, especially the newer and the more junior, look around a room full of people who have done it this way for years, decide the problem must be them, and go quiet. They are usually right, and rarely heard.

If you have ever sat in that room - sensing that things are far harder than they need to be, that the process has quietly become the point, that nobody could actually explain why half of it exists - you were not missing something the experienced people understood. You were seeing something they had stopped noticing. Familiarity is how complexity survives. The people most likely to spot it are the ones who haven’t yet been trained not to.

Simplicity requires more judgement, not less

The hard truth is that the cure is more difficult than the disease. Adding is easy; it asks only for a meeting and a good intention. Removing is hard, because it asks for judgement about what actually matters, and the courage to own the risk of being wrong. Simplicity is not the absence of thought - it is the result of more of it. It is the thing you arrive at last, not first. Which is exactly why so few organisations get there: the path of least resistance runs the other way, and someone has to be willing to walk against it.

That someone does not have to be the chief executive. It can be anyone willing to ask, of any process, report, meeting, or rule they meet: does this create value, or merely consume it? And then to do the harder thing - take something away, and watch what happens. Usually the answer is: nothing bad, and a great deal of relief.

Removing weight has to become a discipline

The organisations that will matter in the next decade are not the ones that manage their complexity best. They are the ones that refuse to accumulate it in the first place - that treat removing weight as a permanent discipline rather than a crisis response, and stay light enough to move when the water changes.

The cost of overcomplication is not paid in any one place. It is paid in speed, in focus, in the people you lose and the moments you miss. And it is paid, in the end, by the organisations that mistook being busy for being built to last.