An executive walks into a meeting room, clearly exasperated. It's been a long day of back-to-back meetings, conflicting priorities, and a growing sens

TBM 321: "Reducing Complexity" - by John Cutler

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2024-11-14 12:00:07

An executive walks into a meeting room, clearly exasperated. It's been a long day of back-to-back meetings, conflicting priorities, and a growing sense that everything is becoming unmanageable. Normally, they don't attend this meeting but need answers for the CEO.

Twelve peering heads stare down from the Zoom meeting. Five more people are in the room. The whiteboard is filled with a web of boxes, arrows, and scribbled notes. The project lead reads through a series of detailed updates from all the dependent teams—flipping through a dense deck while their Zoom audio cuts in and out.

No one in the room seems to be tracking. The executive cracks. "This is too complex!" they exclaim. "We need to simplify this!"

To the executive and many people in the room, everything feels harder than it needs to be. The mental effort needed to understand how all of these pieces fit together is simply too high. They see a tangled web of bureaucracy and friction—an endless maze of dependencies, handoffs, reviews, and people waiting on other people. It feels like sludge.

The team is overcomplicating something that should be straightforward. They're indulging in making things harder than they need to be.