Reflections on leadership #2: Conviction, complexity & the fallacy of precision

One of my favourite business thinkers, Jimmy Allen from Bain, coined the term “Complexity Doom Loop” which charts the near inevitable journey of any growing business. Put simply: Growth creates complexity, Complexity kills growth.

Most of us would instinctively feel this to be true — in complex organisational environments much management time is spent trying to figure out what to do, getting others “aligned” with what to do, figuring out how to get it done and then reporting back on what you have done. Not only does this become soul-destroying for anyone other than “corporate” types who have made navigating and propogating this internal bureaucracy their career, but it rapidly erodes the primary asset of any growing business: speed.

With that singular, simple insight it’s quickly apparent that one of the primary roles of any leader is to reduce complexity, to be allergic to complexity, to make complex things simple. Yet often bad managers (I don’t use the term leader as I think leadership is earned and thus you can’t really be a bad leader — in that case you aren’t a leader at all) achieve the complete opposite: making simple things complex. And as for the complex things…!

Why is this such a well trodden path? Decades of thinking have increasingly presented management as a science, with similar guiding principles to scientific endeavour — namely that there is a “right” or “optimal” answer out there if you look hard enough…