If you want to find complexity, you don’t have to look far. It seeps into processes like damp in an old building—quietly, persistently, and always in places you least expect. Most organisations aren’t designed to be complicated. They simply become so, often by doing what seemed sensible at the time: adding a new step, form, platform, or process to “improve” something.

Thirty years of global project work have taught me a sobering truth: complexity is not a sign of sophistication—it’s often a side-effect of indecision, fear, or legacy systems left to metastasise.  

Systems thinking is clear about this: every additional node or connection in a system increases friction. It adds latency. It introduces failure points, hence risk. You can’t always see it on a flowchart, but you feel it in delivery delays, in staff frustration, and in endless clarifications.

This mindset is common among risk-averse or overstretched leadership teams. But more layers don’t protect the system—they bury it. You end up managing the process instead of the outcome. They didn’t need protection. They needed speed. And speed required clarity.

As someone who’s built and dismantled high-stakes engineering systems, I’ve learned to ask: What’s essential to function? What’s a legacy preference? What’s just noise? 

To simplify well, you must think like an engineer—not a minimalist. The goal is not to strip away arbitrarily, but to design for function.

•  Start with the outcome. Work backward. Ask what steps directly serve the end goal.
•  Test for value. For every process or policy: “What breaks if we remove this?”
•  Avoid edge-case thinking. Don’t over-engineer for exceptions.
•  Set constraints. Force decisions. If a report can only be one page, priorities become visible.

Simplify until it hurts. Then simplify just a bit more.

Smart Questions to think about:

Prompt 1: If your organisation had to run at its current scale for another 20 years with half the process layers it has today, what would you keep, and what would you kill?

Prompt 2: How would that redesign affect your flow of value, your ability to learn, and your responsiveness to future change?