Why Simplification Wins
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Most leadership teams I work with feel stuck.
Not for lack of effort. Not for lack of talent.
The issue isn’t ambition or capability.
It’s complexity.
Over time, leaders add. More priorities. More structure. More process. More meetings. More words. Each addition makes sense in isolation. Each one is meant to help. But together, they quietly bury focus and dilute execution. The organization becomes busy everywhere and effective nowhere.
Contrast that with mastery.
In the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Jiro Ono runs a tiny, ten-seat sushi restaurant in a Tokyo subway station. No expansion. No menu bloat. No shortcuts. Just a lifetime devoted to doing one thing, making sushi, with extraordinary care and discipline. That radical focus earned his restaurant three Michelin stars, one of the highest recognitions in the culinary world. His success didn’t come from adding more. It came from relentless simplification.
That same principle applies to leadership.
The most successful teams don’t outperform by doing more. They outperform by paring work down to its simplest effective form, again and again, until clarity replaces noise and progress accelerates.
Simplification isn’t retreat. It isn’t lowering ambition. And it isn’t laziness.
It’s precision.
It’s focus.
It’s clarity.
It’s removing what isn’t essential until only the simplest, most effective form remains.
And when you look closely, complexity shows up in the same places in nearly every organization: vision, priorities, people structure, and operations.
Different companies. Same failure modes.
That’s where simplification does its real work. And that’s where real progress begins.
Overcomplicating Your Compass
When teams feel stuck, this is often where the problem begins.
Vision, values, and strategy are meant to act like a compass, a clear beacon that cuts through noise and guides decisions. Done well, they simplify everything downstream. Done poorly, they create confusion everywhere.
Many organizations overcomplicate this work. I’ve worked with companies that had nine core values. No one could name them. Recognition became arbitrary because leaders reinforced different behaviors using the same words. Some publish mission statements long enough to say everything, clear enough to mean nothing. Others define their niche so broadly, “we do everything,” that no real filtering happens.
The cost shows up quickly. People can’t remember what matters most. Decisions slow down. Teams compensate by adding more priorities and more process, hoping clarity will emerge later.
It rarely does.
Simplification reverses that. Instead of seven forgettable values, four people can actually name and use. Instead of a paragraph-long mission statement, a purpose you can say in one sentence and feel immediately. Instead of chasing every opportunity, a clear niche that makes trade-offs obvious, because as David Packard warned, organizations are more likely to die of indigestion than starvation.
This isn’t theoretical. I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly across vision work, values work, and long-term goal setting.
When the compass is simple, everything else becomes easier to navigate.
Chasing Too Many Priorities
When the compass is unclear, priorities multiply.
Leadership teams convince themselves that everything is critical. Quarterly plans swell with initiatives, each one justified, each one important. When asked to narrow the list, the response is usually the same: we can’t. This all has to get done. The truth hiding behind that response is simple. Choosing feels risky. Doing everything feels safer.
It doesn’t work. It never does.
What happens next is predictable. Focus fragments. Owners get stretched thin. Three initiatives move from 0% to 20%, but nothing reaches done. Progress turns into motion without completion. At the end of the quarter, the team is exhausted and frustrated that so much effort produced so little to show for it.
I’ve seen leadership teams commit to fifteen priorities in a single quarter. They completed two. The next quarter, we cut the list to four. They completed three. Nothing broke. The business didn’t collapse. The team didn’t lose momentum. They gained it.
This is essentialism in practice. Progress doesn’t come from doing more things. It comes from doing fewer things better, a core principle of Greg McKeown's Essentialism. It’s also “The Planning Paradox” in action. Bold long-term vision only compounds when short-term execution is disciplined and focused.
Simplification changes the game. Fewer priorities force trade-offs. Trade-offs create focus. Focus creates finish lines people can actually reach.
When everything is a priority, nothing truly is.
When priorities are few, progress becomes visible.
Overbuilding Your People Structure
Structure usually breaks in one of two ways.
As organizations grow, leaders either design people structure to accommodate the individuals they have, or they design for a future that hasn’t arrived yet. Both moves feel reasonable. Both create unnecessary complexity.
I’ve seen a 30-person company build a three-layer management structure because they were “planning to scale.” Two years later, they were still at 35 people. Managers were managing one person. Energy went into managing management layers instead of moving the business forward.
More often, people structure bends to accommodate the people already in the organization instead of the clarity the business actually needs. Roles get shaped around strengths, gaps, personalities, or history. Reporting lines get adjusted to make relationships work. Scope gets stretched or narrowed to fit a person rather than the role. Sometimes this is done with good intent. Other times it quietly avoids a harder truth: there isn’t a clear seat for this person, or they aren’t the right fit for where the organization needs to go.
Either way, complexity increases to compensate for misalignment, and it shows up everywhere, especially in meetings. Teams lose confidence that the right people are in the room, so extra meetings get added “just in case.” I once worked with a leadership team that avoided a difficult people decision by running a second version of their weekly meeting without one member present. The cost wasn’t just cultural. It was dozens of leadership hours burned each quarter to avoid a single conversation.
Simplification restores clarity. Structure first. People second. This doesn’t mean people don’t matter. It means clarity of roles and accountability matters more. Design the people structure the business actually needs for the next six to twelve months. Then find, develop, or make changes to fit the right people into those seats.
This takes courage. Honest structure exposes misalignment and forces the people decisions leaders have been avoiding.
Simple structure doesn’t limit growth. It supports it. You can always evolve it as the business grows.
Over-Processing Your Operations
Processes are one of the easiest places for organizations to overcomplicate their work.
It usually starts with good intentions. Teams want consistency. Fewer mistakes. Less tribal knowledge. So they decide to document the process.
And then things spiral.
I once worked with a leadership team that set out to document all of their processes. The intention was good. The execution wasn’t. There was no shared definition of what “good” looked like and no end in mind. Every time a problem surfaced, the response was the same: “We need to document that process.” Over time, they created a spaghetti mess of documentation scattered across folders, tools, and formats. Some read like detailed training manuals with hundreds of steps. Others were so vague they created more confusion than clarity. There was no single place to find anything. Not even the leadership team knew which version was current or correct.
Because the processes were hard to find, they weren’t used. When they were found, they were so inconsistent that people struggled to follow them. Over time, they became irrelevant. The same mistakes kept happening. Delivery became inconsistent. Scaling got harder instead of easier. The organization struggled to operate consistently against its own targets.
Simplification changes the approach. Instead of documenting everything, teams identify the small handful of processes that actually make the business run.
The critical few are different for every organization. They often include things like how you hire and onboard, how you sell and deliver, how you market, and how money moves through the business.
Teams document the critical 20 percent that drives 80 percent of the results and make sure everyone follows the same standard.
This is the case made powerfully in The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. The point isn’t exhaustive detail. It’s clarity. Simple checklists work because they reduce complexity to what actually matters and help capable people perform consistently under pressure.
Processes are never finished. They should be revisited, refined, and simplified over time. The goal isn’t perfection. It’s usefulness.
When process is simple, it supports the work instead of becoming the work.
The Discipline of Simplifying
Across every organization I work with, the pattern is consistent.
Complexity shows up in the same places every time: vision, priorities, people structure, and operations. Different companies. Same failure modes.
When leaders feel stuck, the instinct is to add.
Another priority. Another role. Another process.
Simplification is clarity.
The teams that make real progress simplify relentlessly. They clarify their vision until direction is unmistakable. They choose fewer priorities and execute them with discipline. They design clear structure with obvious ownership and build simple operations people actually follow. Each act of simplification makes the next decision easier. This is how clarity compounds and complexity erodes.
That’s the real lesson from Jiro Dreams of Sushi.
Jiro didn’t pursue mastery by adding complexity. He stripped everything down to its essence. No excess. No noise. Just focus on what mattered most.
The same discipline applies to leadership.
Simplification isn’t a one-time exercise. It’s an ongoing practice. Removing what distracts. Sharpening what remains. Creating clarity your team can actually operate from.
So before you add the next initiative or complicate the system one more time, pause and ask:
What would change if the next move was to simplify?
That question is where progress begins.
Footnotes & Sources
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars (Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1939).
David Gelb (Director), Jiro Dreams of Sushi (Magnolia Pictures, 2011).
Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (Crown Business, 2014).
David Packard, quoted in multiple sources and commonly attributed with the observation that organizations are more likely to fail from “indigestion” than starvation.
Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (Metropolitan Books, 2009).
Josh Holtzman, “The Planning Paradox,” available at www.joshholtzman.me.
