Where is this obsession with oversimplifying everything in business coming from? It’s getting utterly ridiculous.
Everywhere you look people are pushing quick fixes and telling you to try their “simple approach”, which is so easy that “anyone can do it”.
We are bombarded by endless marketing posts promising to break down complex business challenges into “five simple steps.” And gurus insisting you need to “dumb down” your expertise to reach more people.
Rubbish.
What if we’re actually insulting people’s intelligence with all this oversimplification? What if, by chasing after quick fixes, we’re doing more harm than good? What if this world of magic bullets is doing us all a disservice and stifling potential?
We all know the Clarity matters. Being able to communicate complex ideas effectively is crucial. And complex ideas and systems can be broken down into more easily digestible sections. Of course. But there’s a world of difference between being clear and being basic, between breaking it down into manageable chunks and over simplifying, which is the direction we are being pushed in.
There is a difference between being able to replicate processes to produce consistent quality and making them so simple it’s diluted. Between trying to grow your ideal client audience and wasting time and resources addressing the masses who will never buy from you. Between streamlining for efficiency and limiting your potential.
If someone is offering you a solution that dismisses the complexity of the situation, do you really think their generic 5 step process is going to get you anywhere?
Your business challenges aren’t basic. The market you operate in isn’t basic. Your expertise certainly isn’t basic. Your clients aren’t basic. So why are we pretending that the solutions should be?
I had a conversation with a CEO this week who spent a fortune on a management programme to level up the leadership in her organisation last year. She brought in a consultant who asked very little about the company and told her there was a really simple solution. Give them all a personality test, debrief it and then deliver a few generic training sessions on what good management looks like. It was simple, easy to deliver and ready immediately. It also had little to no impact on her organisation. The only real achievement was lost management time and an expensive pile of notes gathering dust on everyone’s shelf.
The CEO was baffled and frustrated. The managers knew what good management looked like. They weren’t daft. They were also all very capable and intelligent people. They wouldn’t be in leadership positions in the business if that wasn’t the case. The consultant was an expert, the points made in the training seemed fairly easy to grasp and all the managers had completed the programme. So, what went wrong? Why did nothing change?
The ‘simple’ answer is that the managers were trained on the assumption they knew nothing about how to do their jobs. They did. The issue was that there was no framework round the solution that addressed the specific challenges of that business or supported the managers to implement changes to their personal approach that reflected the needs of their teams, their expertise and played to their strengths. The solution offered had been basic and easy, in fact, so basic and easy that it had done nothing at all.
We have got to stop getting confused between “making things clear” and “making things basic.” They’re not the same thing. At all.
Making things clear means illuminating complexity, not eliminating it.
Making things basic means stripping away nuance until what’s left is… well, basic.
Anyone can offer basic, but not everyone can offer what you and your business delivers or what you and your business need.
The thing is that sometimes business IS complex. Sometimes the answer isn’t a simple five-step process. A degree of sophistication is needed. Sometimes you need to embrace the greatness of what you’ve built and work with it, not against it.
Imagine if brain surgeons were told to “keep it simple” and “just focus on the basics.” Terrifying thought, isn’t it?
So why is the training industry full on people telling experienced, intelligent and expert business leaders to ignore their hard-won expertise in favour of someone else’s oversimplified framework. It’s past time to change the record isn’t it?
Perhaps we could stop apologising for complexity and start celebrating it instead. Start working with that rich and diverse tapestry of expertise and experience and shift the focus to looking at potential, not simplifying ourselves into obscurity.
Because whether you’re running a multinational corporation or a boutique consultancy, your business deserves more than basic solutions. Your expertise deserves more than being watered down. And your clients? They deserve more than oversimplified platitudes.
Let’s stop pretending that every business or personal challenge has a “simple” solution. If it was that easy, it wouldn’t be a challenge. Some things are complex for a reason. And that is as it should be.
