Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity
The incentive structure punishes clarity.
That’s the whole story, really. Everything else is just watching it play out in slow motion across every organisation that has ever existed.
Think about what gets rewarded.
The analyst who builds the forty-tab model with colour-coded scenarios and three levels of sensitivity analysis. The consultant who delivers the deck with ninety slides and a proprietary framework with a name that sounds like a pharmaceutical. The manager who runs six workstreams simultaneously and speaks in the language of transformation. These people get promoted.
The person who walks in and says “here’s what’s actually happening, here’s the one thing that matters, here’s what we should do” gets thanked briefly and then watched with mild suspicion.
Complexity signals effort. Simplicity signals laziness, even when it’s the opposite. Even when arriving at the simple answer required internalising the complex one first, holding it, turning it over, finding the load-bearing piece, and cutting everything else. That process is invisible. The forty-tab model is visible.
Organisations reward what they can see.
There’s also a protection racket running underneath this. Complexity is cover. If the recommendation is buried inside enough caveats, frameworks, and conditional logic, then when it fails, no one failed. The process was followed. The analysis was thorough. Accountability diffuses across the methodology.
A clean, simple call has an author. A complicated one has a process.
Processes don’t get fired.
And so people learn. Not consciously. The lesson arrives through repetition, through watching who moves up and who stays where they are, through the small social feedback of a meeting where the simple answer was greeted with silence and the complicated one was greeted with nodding. You absorb it. You start adding slides. You start hedging. You start building the framework even when you already know the answer without it.
Simplicity is genuinely harder.
Anyone can add. Subtraction requires understanding the whole thing well enough to know what can be removed without the structure collapsing. The person who hands you the one-page summary has almost certainly read the hundred pages. The person who gives you the single recommendation has usually run the full decision tree in their head and discarded the branches. You are benefiting from their compression and rewarding their more verbose colleague for the length of their output.
Some organisations know this at the rhetorical level. They say they value directness, clarity, cutting through noise. A few even mean it. But watch what happens in the next review cycle. Watch who gets the expanded scope. Watch what got praised in the last all-hands.
The rhetoric is usually upstream of the reality by about two years, if it ever closes at all.
The people who stay simple anyway tend to be either very secure or very clear-eyed about their own priorities. They’ve stopped needing the performance to feel like they’re contributing. They know the difference between the work and the display of the work, and they’ve chosen the work.
That choice costs something real.
Which is not an argument against making it. It’s just an argument for making it with both eyes open.
Nobody gets promoted for simplicity.
Some people do it anyway. They’re usually the ones worth listening to.