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.

The way we think about and act upon complexity is wrong – dead wrong – and it’s dramatically affecting our performance, our sanity, our lives. We’ve focused for too long on complexity management. But we hit a wall, again and again, only reinforcing the Complexity Disease to the point we surrender to it and/or become blind to it. We’re first told the world is becoming overly complex, and then we’re bombarded with frameworks, approaches, initiatives, setups, programs – all quite complex in their own right – that are supposed to help us manage this complexity, and perform better in business, government, or life in general. This is the Complexity Fallacy. And it is self-inflicted. Complexity is not a concept “out there” in the world – we create it, we surrender to it, and we let it develop into a disease; then we suffer from it, manage its symptoms to reduce our pain, all with little foresight and courage to fight and defeat it – which is the only path to True Performance.

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.