Rend Stephan

So much has been said about leadership – most of it genuine, insightful and somewhat effective. Some approaches provide tips, tools, tactics; while others focus more on principles, mindsets, character.
But please consider this: why does every achievement drain you, your teams, your organization? Why is peak performance so elusive? Despite the expert advice, massive competency, and leadership development, two-thirds of all major initiatives fail to deliver.
What I’m here to tell you there’s a critical missing ingredient in the leadership equation, and it’s at the heart of most performance failures.
This missing ingredient is complexity.
Engaging with leaders and senior decision-makers around the globe for 20 years, I’ve witnessed complexity spread far and deep, eating away many leaders’ potential, denying them the performance and success they deserve.
Your ability to fight and defeat this Complexity Disease is the critical missing ingredient in your leadership equation.

Renovating a home includes a series of rational decisions that add tangible value. Over time, considering a new replacement home become more difficult– even as you see new homes with a significant difference versus your well-maintained home.
What happened is that your home has become quite “complex”. Whatever improvements one can make, a newly built home will always better fulfill the owners’ needs – in a competitive sense.
That is the “home renovation paradox”: a series of otherwise rational decisions that nevertheless lead to a suboptimal (competitively speaking) outcome. This paradox can be seen everywhere.
Incremental improvements also allow complexity to creep stealthily in, bit by bit. We don’t notice it, and we continue to not take it into account in our decisions. We become used to it, it enters our DNA, so that, even in new programs, we can’t help but add complexity.
It’s time for a new mindset that allows us to escape this paradox at the heart of much under-performance.

I find many attempts to define complexity to be complex in their own right. Hence I would urge you to focus on two insights, from Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein.
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, and
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”.
The first positions seeking simplicity, and hence fighting complexity, as the ultimate goal.
The second explicitly positions complexity on a continuum and warns that going too far in reducing complexity may also be harmful.
I will also add a final insight: intrinsic complexity. Every system has an intrinsic (natural, optimal) complexity level, which is to be sought. I am sure you would acknowledge that a nuclear plant would be intrinsically more complex than an ice-cream factory.
We generally make false assumptions about the intrinsic complexity of a system i.e. we assume it needs to be more complex. This complexity fallacy mindset is at the heart of the complexity disease.

The 3 I’s : there is not competitive growth nor true performance within complexity - period. And complexity must be addressed holistically across Insight (the quest for being lucid), Intent (the art of focusing energy) and Impact (the bias for relevant action).

Your leadership journey cannot be successful or rewarding without the critical missing ingredient: your ability to fight and defeat complexity. Without it, all your other leadership efforts and actions count for little, and cost too much.
Einstein said, “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
Instead of more frameworks to manage complexity, The Ultimate Leadership Challenge is offering you rules and principles to end it instead.
Complexity management frameworks are to ending complexity principles, what self-help blogs are to philosophy books. Yes, you may be able to improve a few things with self-help tips, but you need a deep philosophical mindset change, i.e. reworking how you fundamentally see the world, to really develop and grow, holistically and sustainably.
That’s the only way to earn the right to be the best leader you can be and want to be.