Complexity is also camouflage. Every system you design, process you add, and “nice-to-have” you ship hides the terror of being found out.
That 50-page strategy you wrote is not brilliance. But it is armor against the only question that matters: What do you actually do? Each appendix is another plate for your suit.
You know the dead features. The analytics shout it: 0.3% adoption after six months and $400,000. You keep them because killing them means admitting you were wrong when you nodded in a product meeting. So your product gets slower, your team gets colder and no one owns the bill.
Your Tuesday 2 p.m. sync burns $2,400 a week in salary time to say nothing new. It survives because canceling it would indict the last 78 you held.
Because most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquillity. Ask yourself at every moment, “Is this necessary?” But we need to eliminate unnecessary assumptions as well. To eliminate the unnecessary actions that follow. — IV. 24
Twelve people are eating your corner of the market while your twelve hundred hold alignment sessions. Why? They ship daily, talk to users, and decide. No “Center of Excellence.” Just ownership.
Your nine‑month, six‑department “initiative” produced what a competent freelancer could build in a few weekends. The org chart bloated and you mistook the swelling for consensus.
Your 14‑person leadership team isn’t diversity of thought. It’s shared cover. Decisions age out in committee because someone might bruise. The innovation lab on Floor 7 ships slide-ware so no one has to admit a $4M mistake.
Process multiplies places to hide and people to blame. In a simple system, accountability has a face. In a complex one, it has a flowchart.
Your best engineer didn’t leave for money. She left because deploying took two weeks and three committees, and a $50 tool needed six approvals. Good ideas died in rooms built to keep bad ones alive.
Your app loads in 4.7 seconds. Onboarding has 23 steps. Users aren’t dumb but they are exhausted. The “advanced mode” and “customization engine” you love move no numbers but they protect egos and hypothetical enterprise deals.
When you say “consider all stakeholders,” you mean you’re scared to decide. “Holistic approach” means you’ll do everything poorly. “Data‑driven” means you’ll stall behind spreadsheets until someone else chooses. “Let’s iterate” means you hope time will pick for you.
Customers aren’t leaving for better ideas but they are leaving for fewer obstacles. Investors see the theater and discount accordingly. Most companies aren’t killed by competitors. They choke on their own options.
So try clarity: cut the feature set by half, cancel every recurring meeting, remove anything under 10% adoption, cap approvals at two and tell the $2M client thats the noose around your neck to use the product as designed or churn.
People will panic. The board may flinch. You might lose your job.
You also might build something that matters.
Right now you trade clarity for safety, busy for productive and complexity for courage.
But you need to stop hiding. The monument to complexity you’ve built is not sophistication.
It’s fear. And everyone knows it.