📅 The Weekly Edge

— Why Complexity Is a Leadership Failure

Rule: Simplicity scales.

Source: Simple Rules by Donald Sull & Kathleen M. Eisenhardt

Complexity usually arrives quietly, in the form of exceptions that seemed reasonable at the time.

Sull and Eisenhardt studied how organizations navigate complex environments and found that the most effective ones don’t respond to complexity with more complexity. They respond with a small set of clear principles that guide decisions at every level.

Most organizations do the reverse. Each problem generates a policy. Each policy generates an exception. Each exception requires interpretation. Over time, the organization becomes harder to run and slower to move, not because the business has changed but because the internal complexity has grown beyond what the team can manage.

The leaders who build scalable businesses have developed an instinct for simplification. When a process has too many steps, they cut. When a policy covers edge cases that almost never occur, they eliminate it. When a decision requires too many approvals, they push authority down and accept the associated risk.

This is not recklessness. It is the recognition that organizations are already complex by nature, and the role of leadership is to reduce unnecessary complexity wherever possible.

Simplicity scales is a core principle at The Executives’ Institute because it is one of the things that separates businesses that can grow from businesses that collapse under their own weight.

The simplest version of a process that works is almost always better than a complicated version that also works.