Complexity is lazy. Engineers do it first: they spin up a dozen microservices on day three of a startup, feel brilliant for designing something “future-proof,” and then spend the next two years maintaining a distributed Rube Goldberg machine. Leaders fall for the same trap. It’s shockingly easy to grind a company to a halt not by being incompetent, but by being smart in all the wrong ways.

Add another process. Schedule another review. Kick off another initiative. Keep adding until no one can tell what actually matters. Keeping things simple is the real power move. It’s the grown-up version of leadership. It’s also brutally difficult.

Black Friday special: The yearly membership for Unplugged with Aviv at $80 instead of $95—for life. A live monthly session, and you get immediate access to the back catalog!

The Lazy Cleverness of Complexity

We trick ourselves into thinking complexity equals intelligence. Craft a process that handles every edge case? Feels impressive. Spot a tiny micro-optimization and propose a whole workflow to prevent it? Feels sharp. Except it’s all overhead.

I’ve had founders swear they couldn’t name the company’s top 2–3 priorities. After a lot of sweat, they produced a list that looked reasonable… and had absolutely nothing to do with what the team was working on. They weren’t clueless. Complexity had simply fogged their view.

I see the same thing when startups stack goal frameworks like Jenga blocks: OKRs, KPIs, North Stars, strategic pillars, quarterly themes, “areas of excellence,” and pet projects. Everyone nods along, but no one can tell you what the company is actually aiming for. The result isn’t alignment. It’s passionate confusion. Strategies and roadmaps mean nothing if they don’t create shared focus.

This is the leadership equivalent of adding another configuration option rather than deciding what the product actually stands for. It feels flexible. It feels safe. It’s neither. Simplicity forces decisions. Complexity lets you dodge them.

Real Leadership Is Distillation

It’s harder to strip things down and choose fewer goals. It’s challenging to say “no” to something that sounds smart. That’s where leadership shows up.

Here’s how to embrace simplicity before complexity becomes your operating system:

Protect decisions from the idea pile: Don’t reward every clever thought with a place on the roadmap. Create a bright line between “interesting notions” and “we’re committing to this.” Most leaders erase that line and end up with clutter disguised as strategy.

Prefer clarity over precision: A CEO walked me through a labyrinth of sales scenarios for the next quarter. After ten minutes, no human alive could repeat the model back to him. So we scrapped it. We replaced it with a simple target: new deals per week. Like a sprint burndown chart, it’s not perfect. It doesn’t predict every outcome. But it gives you alignment instantly. And alignment buys speed.

Don’t ossify every mistake: Some errors deserve to happen once. If every hiccup becomes a new confirmation step, a new sign-off requirement, another “make sure to loop me in,” you will turn your company into a museum of bureaucratic fossils. Use judgment. Not every risk is worth eliminating. Not everything needs a process.

Simple leadership isn’t minimalism. It’s discipline. It’s the refusal to hide behind complexity. It’s choosing a small number of things that truly matter and making them impossible for the team to misunderstand.

Anyone can build a complicated system. Leaders build simple ones that work.