Smart people seem to love complexity, often feeling that the more complex they make things, the more they can find an answer that others can’t.
The image above is from a scene in The Big Short, set in 2005, where one of the lead characters realise just how much a time bomb has been created by “smart” people layering complexity upon complexity to look to create financial value out of, well, dogs**t loans. This led to the Global Financial Crisis from 2008 onwards.
In 2021, though, we still love complexity, seeing investment banks and fund managers hiring the smartest mathematicians and getting them to crunch all kinds of “big data” to see if they can gain an “edge”.
Yes, complexity can be the right approach, but how about sometimes, instead of focussing on ever-increasing layers of complexity, we lead others by keeping it simple?
“Leadership is about people, end of story”, so leading people is about having a message everyone can get behind. Can you keep it simple? Can you get your message down to one or two words? You can, and it can be counter-intuitive. To edit down to one or two words can take time and patience.
My thoughts go to this after spending three hours in a monthly meeting with a client reviewing a key strategy they are seeking to get alignment on and so agreement to within their business at different layers. We talked through much complexity, layers, elements, variables. In the end, though, we narrowed it down to one word. One.
Yes, under that one word we had three themes that give depth to the one word, but with the message edited down to one word, they could now go out and get alignment on that quickly and easily.
Sometimes complexity makes sense, but sometimes it is better to keep it simple.
PS a friend of mine recently told me that when new people join their business he tells them “read everything by Michael Lewis” so they can understand how the world works. I quite agree, he is both eminently readable and has a way of focussing on how humans behave and how that can both create great wins and also massive losses. It is also a simple message: “read Michael Lewis”.