The Art of Simplicity

In the space of three weeks, three major companies announced the same thing: they had become too complicated to compete. This is not a coincidence. It is the defining leadership challenge of our time.

This article is part of The Art of Leadership series, where I cover twelve principles of leadership that my research found underpin superior company performance. Read the full series here.

In the summer of 2026, three of the world’s best-known companies admitted the same thing.

In July, Microsoft’s Xbox division announced the most significant restructure in its history. The reason its CEO gave was not competition or technology or the market. It was complexity. In some parts of the business, work passed through as many as 14 layers of management. Platform teams had grown 40% larger even as the player base declined. “That complexity has slowed decisions, blurred accountability, and made it harder to deliver,” the CEO wrote. The remedy? “Great technology gets better when it gets simpler, not bigger.”

That same month, Lucid, the electric vehicle maker, brought in a new CEO who halved the number of executives reporting directly to him, framing the move as a way to simplify the structure and sharpen accountability.

And a few weeks earlier, at its June annual general meeting, the Volkswagen Group made reducing complexity the first of eight strategic priorities. The CEO committed to building fewer models, fewer variants, and fewer platforms, concentrating resources on the vehicles that sell rather than maintaining a sprawling lineup of middling performers.

Three companies. Three industries. Three continents. One diagnosis.

None of them said “we have a strategy problem” or “we have a talent problem” or “we have a technology problem.” Each of them said, in effect: we have become too complicated to compete.

This is important: these are not isolated stories. They reflect the single most underrated leadership challenge of our time. Complexity accumulates gradually in your products, processes, organisation, and strategy, until one day it strangles the business. And by then, fixing it requires the kind of painful restructuring that Xbox, Lucid, and Volkswagen are now going through.

The leaders who avoid that fate are the ones who treat simplicity not as a one-time cleanup, but as a discipline. By the end of this article, you will have a single test you can apply to any part of your business, a framework for spotting the three patterns that create unnecessary complexity, and a process for cutting through them before they force your hand.

Let’s get into it.

Why complexity accumulates

Here is the thing about the Xbox story that should worry every leader. Nobody at Microsoft decided to build 14 layers of management. It accumulated. One reorganisation at a time, one new team at a time, one well-intentioned hire at a time, until the structure had become something nobody would have designed on purpose.

That is how complexity always arrives. Not through a single bad decision, but through a thousand reasonable ones.

A product launches with four features. Customers ask for a fifth. Then a sixth. Then a configuration option. Then a variant for a different market. Nobody ever says “let’s make this complicated.” Each addition makes sense in isolation. But five years later, the product has 40 features and nobody can explain what it does. This is precisely the trap Volkswagen fell into, launching more than 30 new models in a single year until its own lineup became too complex to manage.

The same thing happens to processes. A procurement system starts with three steps. An audit adds a fourth. A compliance requirement adds a fifth. A new regulation adds a sixth. Each step is defensible on its own. Together they produce a system so slow that people find workarounds, which creates a shadow process alongside the official one, which is now more complex than ever.

And it happens to strategy. Every planning cycle, new priorities are added. Old ones are never removed. The list grows from five to eight to twelve to twenty, and at some point it stops being a list of priorities and becomes a catalogue of everything the firm cares about. A strategy with twenty priorities is a strategy with zero priorities.

Remember: complexity is almost never designed. It is the residue of decisions that were individually rational but collectively suffocating. And because each piece was added for a good reason, nobody feels empowered to remove it.

That is the leader’s job. Xbox’s leadership left it so long that the correction required cutting thousands of jobs. The discipline of simplicity is what stops you from ever reaching that point.

The simplicity test

Here is a test you can apply to anything in your business. A product, a process, a team structure, a strategy, a customer journey, a meeting cadence. Anything.

Can someone who has never seen it before understand how it works in under two minutes?

If yes, it is simple enough. If no, it needs to change.

Let me make this concrete.

Products. Can a new customer understand what your product does and why they need it without a demo, a sales call, or a 30-page brochure? Apple’s iPhone launched with a single sentence: “An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator.” Three things. One device. Everybody understood. Volkswagen’s problem is the opposite: a range so vast that customers themselves struggle to navigate it, which is exactly why “make navigating the range easier” became an explicit goal of its transformation.

Processes. Can a new employee navigate your procurement system, your approval process, or your expense system without calling someone for help? If the process requires a training session, the process is too complex.

Teams. Can every person on your team describe their role and how it connects to the team’s objective in one sentence? If they cannot, the structure carries ambiguity that slows every decision. This is the Lucid problem and the Xbox problem: too many reporting layers, too many direct reports, accountability blurred across so many people that decisions bottleneck and nobody quite owns the outcome.

Strategy. Can you describe what your firm is building around and why in three sentences? Sentence one: what is changing in the world. Sentence two: what you are building in response. Sentence three: where the capital is going. If you struggle with any of these, the strategy has not been reduced to a form that can be embedded throughout the organisation.

Customer experience. Can a customer buy from you, get support, renew, or leave without encountering friction that exists only because your internal processes require it? Every step that serves your operations rather than your customer is a step that should be questioned.

Remember: the test is not “is this thing simple?” The test is “can someone understand it quickly?” Simplicity is about clarity, not minimalism. A complex product with a clear value proposition passes the test. A simple product with confusing positioning does not.

The three enemies of simplicity

Three patterns create unnecessary complexity in almost every organisation. You will recognise them, and you will recognise them in the stories above.

The addition habit. Adding is easy. Removing is hard. A product manager adds a feature because a customer asked for it. A compliance team adds a step because an audit recommended it. A leadership team adds a priority because the CEO asked for it. Each addition is a small decision. Nobody holds a meeting to discuss whether the cumulative weight of all those small decisions is crushing the thing underneath. Xbox added teams, layers, and investment “hoping for a better outcome,” in its CEO’s own words, until the additions themselves became the problem.

The discipline of simplicity is the discipline of subtraction. For every feature, every step, every priority you add, also ask: what am I willing to remove? If the answer is nothing, you are accumulating, not simplifying.

The hedge. A leadership team that cannot agree on three priorities compromises by including six, satisfying everyone and committing the firm to nothing. A product team that cannot decide between two directions ships both, confusing the customer. A process owner who cannot determine which steps are necessary keeps all of them, because removing one feels riskier than keeping twelve.

The hedge feels like consensus. It is genuinely an abdication of the most important leadership responsibility, which is to choose. The firms that dominated their industries chose three or four external changes to organise around. Their competitors hedged with more (or chose none at all, which is a different type of problem).

The jargon shield. Complex language hides unclear thinking. “We will leverage our core competencies to drive synergistic value across our ecosystem” means nothing. It could describe any firm in any industry.

Strip the jargon and ask: what are we actually doing, and why? If the answer is clear, the jargon is unnecessary. If the answer is not clear, the jargon is hiding that fact.

What simplicity actually demands

You might be thinking, “My business is genuinely complex. I cannot simplify it without losing something important.”

Of course your business is complex. Every business is complex. The question is whether your products, processes, structures, and strategy need to carry that complexity or cut through it.

Consider what Steve Jobs did when he returned to Apple in 1997. Apple had dozens of products across multiple categories, with overlapping lines and confused positioning. Jobs drew a two-by-two grid: consumer and professional across the top, desktop and portable down the side.

Four products. Everything else was killed.

That was not a simplification of a complex reality. It was a decision. Jobs decided what mattered and eliminated what did not. The complexity of Apple’s product line was real. The strategic response to it was radical simplicity, and that simplicity gave every person at Apple a framework for evaluating any proposal: does it fill one of the four boxes? If yes, proceed. If no, stop.

Think of it this way. Your business is like a radio signal. The clearer and stronger the signal, the further it travels, to your customers, your employees, your investors. Add noise, add static, add fourteen competing frequencies, and the signal degrades before it reaches anyone. Simplicity is what makes the signal travel.

How to simplify without losing substance

Here is the process. It takes discipline, and it will feel like you are losing something valuable.

You are not. You are finding what has always been there beneath the complexity. Stick with it.

Apply the two-minute test. Pick any product, process, team structure, or strategy in your business. Describe it to someone who has never seen it. Time yourself. If it takes more than two minutes, identify what is creating the length: too many features, too many steps, too many priorities, or unclear language. Each source of length is a candidate for reduction.

Subtract before you add. Before the next planning cycle, the next product release, the next process revision, establish a rule: for every new element added, one existing element must be removed. This sounds mechanical. It is. That is the point. Without a structural constraint, the addition habit will reassert itself in no time, and you will be Xbox in five years, cutting layers you should never have built.

Kill the hedges ruthlessly. If your strategy lists more than 4 priorities, reduce them. If your product serves more than three clear use cases, focus. If your approval process has more than five steps, question every one. The discomfort you feel when removing something is the feeling of making a real decision. Lean into it.

Test it on an outsider. Explain your product to someone who has never used it. Describe your strategy to someone outside your industry. Walk a new employee through your most important process without help. If they understand, you have achieved simplicity. If they do not, frankly, you have more work to do, and the work is in the substance, not the presentation.

What next?

The leaders at Xbox, Lucid, and Volkswagen are all now doing the hard, painful work of removing complexity that should never have been allowed to accumulate. Restructures. Layoffs. Written-down investments. The correction is expensive, and it is public, and it is a warning.

You do not have to end up there. Simplicity is a discipline you can practise continuously, long before complexity forces a crisis. And it is the foundation of everything else in leadership. You cannot tell a clear story if the underlying thinking is muddled. You cannot listen effectively if you do not know which signals matter. You cannot build products customers love, processes employees can follow, or strategies that survive contact with the real world if every one of them is buried under layers of accumulated complexity.

The two-minute test is waiting for you. Apply it to one thing in your business today. Your strategy. Your flagship product. Your hiring process. Your customer onboarding.

If it passes, move to the next one. If it does not, you have just found the most important problem to solve this quarter, while it is still your choice to solve it.

Start simplifying.