How to Avoid Unnecessary Complexity as You Scale

Is your company simple enough to scale?

Steve Jobs was a master of simplicity. He once said, “You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.”

But what does “clean thinking” mean? And what is the work required to get there?

If you want to scale, and you’ve realised you’re hitting a complexity ceiling, this one's for you.

1. Complexity comes from multiple goals

If you’ve ever worked with a high performer, you’ll notice they keep asking the same question: “What’s the end goal?”

It’s annoying because, as founders, our answer is often: there are several goals.

Boiling things down to a single goal feels reductive, whereas multiple goals feel safer.

However, every extra goal adds complexity.

To illustrate this, imagine you were designing a website for a company with two products for two different customers.

• What’s the messaging given that there are two customers?
• Which product do you present first?
• How will you measure success? Clicking to which page? Capturing emails from which customer?

Multiple products and customers always lead to a cascade of trade-offs, each of which increases the complexity of the system. 

The point is, whatever you ship will be more complex than if the company did one thing for one customer.

Multiple goals are the root cause of complex systems.

2. Multiple goals come from hidden commitments

Most founders already know simplicity scales and complex fails. But they pursue multiple goals anyway.

• New products.
• Extra features.
• A personal brand.
• A better HQ.

Everything you do serves a goal, but not all goals are clean.

• A clean goal exists only to serve the #1 goal.
• A dirty goal carries a hidden commitment.

Take personal branding. A founder might say it would support company growth—and that might be partly true. But hidden commitments might include:

• Reducing personal risk if the company fails
• Avoiding disappointment from investors or peers
• A craving for recognition no longer met inside the company.

These motives are often unconscious, and to avoid cognitive dissonance, the brain justifies them with a lie:

‘They’re synergistic with my main goal.’

Anyone who’s ever done M&A knows to be deeply sceptical of the word "synergy".

It's how we often justify doing something we already want to do.

3. Hidden commitments come from ego

So where do these hidden commitments come from?

Often, they come from how you want to be seen by others.

For example, if you want to be seen as helpful, doing something that disappoints someone threatens that identity. So you say “yes.”

If you want to be seen as industrious, losing a competitive bid threatens that identity. So you buy the company.

Hidden commitments exist to protect an identity you’re attached to. And they manifest as goals which make your systems more complex.

After many conversations with founders, I've noticed that not wanting to disappoint people is one of the biggest drivers of hidden commitments.

It shows up as:

• Broad strategies designed to please multiple customers
• Hires made to keep investors happy
• Awkward org structures built to avoid upsetting a particular person on the team

But here’s the paradox: the more you try not to disappoint people, the more you do.

4. Breaking the cycle

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl describes a patient who was terrified of sweating in public—and found that the fear itself made him sweat more.

Frankl noticed this pattern everywhere: the fear of something often creates more of the thing you fear.

Fear of disappointing people leads you to disappoint people.

His solution was paradoxical intention.

Instead of trying to stop the sweating, he told the patient to actively try to sweat as much as possible. Even to joke about it—it turns out humour is helpful here.

By removing the pressure to not sweat, the anxiety dropped, and the sweating reduced.

This reverse psychology also applies to disappointing people.

If you want to reduce the fear of disappointing others, you have to practise disappointing them... on purpose.

When you do, you end up being more clear, more confident, and while people might be initially disappointed, it's quickly replaced with something else: the respect that having a singular goal commands.

And the more singular the goal, the more simple your product, system and company.

The question is: are you truly ready to disappoint other people in pursuit of something bigger?

Related reading:

• Why CEOs Must Embrace The Impossible
  
• How to Cultivate a Growth Mindset on Your Team
• What Thinking Big Actually Means
  

Originally published on January 21, 2026.