Complexity is the silent killer of businesses that are working.
How success quietly makes your business fragile
Here’s Week 11:
The Main Piece: The Complexity Tax
Most business failures are legible. You ran out of money. The market wasn’t there. A competitor moved faster. These failures have names, and we study them because they’re visible.
The failure mode nobody talks about is the one that happens to businesses that are succeeding. It’s slower, quieter, and by the time it’s obvious, it’s expensive to reverse. It’s complexity — and unlike the failures that come from doing the wrong things, this one comes entirely from doing the right things at the wrong accumulation rate.
Here’s how it works. A growing business makes rational additions. A new feature because customers asked for it. A new approval process because something went wrong once. A new hire to handle a function that’s getting too big for one person. A new reporting layer because the team is larger now. Each individual decision is defensible. Each one, considered in isolation, is probably correct. The problem isn’t any single addition. It’s what happens when several years of individually correct additions compound into a system that’s become genuinely difficult to operate.
Research on organizational complexity — Kathleen Eisenhardt’s work on high-velocity decision-making, studies on firm age and structural inertia — consistently identifies the same pattern: as organizations grow and accumulate complexity, decision speed slows, coordination costs rise, and the margin available per unit of output shrinks. Not because people are working less hard, but because an increasing share of effort is consumed by the organization managing itself rather than serving customers.
The symptoms are predictable. A product that used to ship features in a week now takes a quarter. A customer complaint that used to be resolved in an afternoon now moves through three teams. A strategic pivot that would have taken a month now takes a year. Leaders look at these symptoms and reach for operational solutions — better project management, more standups, clearer ownership. The diagnosis is usually correct. The treatment rarely addresses the cause.
Complexity is a strategy problem wearing an operations costume. It accumulates because growth creates pressure to add and almost no pressure to subtract. Every new process, every new role, every new layer of approval was added because someone identified a genuine need. Nobody ever adds complexity deliberately. It arrives as a byproduct of solving real problems without asking what the solution costs the rest of the system.
The founders and operators I’ve watched manage this well share one habit: they treat simplicity as an active discipline, not a default state. They prune deliberately and regularly. They ask not just “does this solve the problem?” but “what does this addition cost everything else?” They understand that the constraint on their business five years from now will not be what they failed to add. It will be what they failed to remove.
You Asked
“Our product has grown significantly, and everything feels harder to move. We’re slower than we were two years ago with half the team. What are we actually dealing with?”
What you’re describing is almost certainly a complexity problem, not a talent or process problem — though it will feel like both.
The tell is the timeline you gave. Two years ago, smaller team, faster movement. That pattern doesn’t come from people getting worse at their jobs. It comes from the system around them getting more complicated. Every coordination point added, every approval layer introduced, every dependency created between teams is friction. It’s invisible in the moment and cumulative over time.
The diagnostic question is: what does it take to make a small change? Pick something simple — a copy update on a page, a minor adjustment to a workflow, a response to a customer request. Count every person, meeting, review, and handoff involved. If a small change requires significant organizational effort, your complexity tax is already high.
The fix is not a reorganization. Reorgs move the complexity around; they rarely reduce it. The fix is a systematic audit of what you’re doing that produces the least value relative to the coordination cost it creates. Features used by almost no one. Processes that exist because of one incident two years ago. Approval steps that don’t actually change outcomes. Every one of these is a candidate for removal.
The goal isn’t to get back to how you operated two years ago. It’s to build the discipline of subtraction into how you operate going forward. Addition is easy. Removal requires conviction. The businesses that stay fast as they grow are the ones where someone is actively responsible for making things simpler — not just adding the next thing.
The Quick Hit
Three things worth knowing this week:
The complexity tax compounds like interest. Each coordination point added to a system doesn’t just cost what it costs today — it increases the cost of every future change that has to move through it. A small slowdown in year two becomes a significant drag by year four. This is why complexity is best addressed early, when removal is still relatively cheap, rather than after it’s fully embedded in how the organization operates.
Simplicity is a competitive advantage, not a constraint. The organizations that can move fastest are not the ones with the most resources. They’re the ones with the fewest unnecessary dependencies. A small team operating a simple system will consistently outmaneuver a larger team operating a complex one — until the larger team removes the complexity, at which point scale advantages actually kick in. The sequence matters.
The features your customers don’t use are costing you more than you think. Every feature in a product has to be maintained, documented, tested, and considered in every future change. A feature used by 2% of your users is not free because no one has complained about it. It’s taxing your development velocity, your support load, and your codebase every single day it exists. The ruthless audit of what to keep is one of the highest-leverage things a product team can do — and one of the least comfortable.
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— Dr. Brown