The collective responsibility of making things simpler
Why leaders need to absorb complexity instead of exporting it
A year ago, I had a conversation with my hairdresser, a successful small-business owner in his early 50s.
In a typical hairdresser chat, we discussed what I do for work. And when I told him, he said, almost apologetically: “I find it hard to understand everything that’s going on in the world. Everything feels so complicated all the time.”
That comment stayed with me.
My work is about connecting dots, identifying patterns, and helping organisations navigate complexity. And much of what business leaders face today is complex: data pointing in different directions, short-term incentives undermining long-term goals, and consequences that only become visible when multiple trends intersect.
I enjoy working on these kinds of problems — the messy, complicated ones. But I’m increasingly aware that most people don’t.
Take last week’s newsletter about the US’s new security strategy. While the breakdown seemed to resonate with many of you, the central insight — that European users of US technology are funding efforts that undermine European democracy — only emerges if you map consequences across several steps.
Most people don’t have the time, context, or appetite to constantly engage in that kind of multi-step reasoning about vague signals and long-term implications.
And I’m not convinced they should have to.
Whether it’s climate change, geopolitical tension, or migration, the critical question isn’t why people disengage — but why we keep designing strategies, systems, and narratives that require expert-level sensemaking to understand.
Somewhere along the way, we started treating complexity as something everyone is individually responsible for navigating. Instead of absorbing it at the top — in leadership teams, government institutions and organisations — we pass it downwards and call it transparency.
Leaders, strategists, journalists, policymakers, researchers — people like me — are paid to sit with complexity. We map second- and third-order consequences and translate uncertainty into direction. But when we fail to do that work properly, we push the cognitive burden onto everyone else and call it “being informed”.
Making things simpler doesn’t mean dumbing them down. It means taking responsibility for interpretation: deciding what matters, explaining why it matters, and being honest about what is still uncertain.
If we don’t, people will keep disengaging — not because they don’t care, but because we’ve made understanding too costly.
To me, this is a collective leadership failure.
Communication is a skill. And it goes far beyond choosing the right words or making pretty slides. It’s about deciding what complexity you take on yourself — and what complexity you pass on to others.
Every time we share a new strategy, announce organisational changes, or introduce a new policy without clearly explaining why it exists, what assumptions we’ve made, and who benefits, we shift the burden of sensemaking to the receiver.
Over time, people stop listening. Not because they don’t care, but because they’ve learned that understanding requires more effort than they can reasonably give.
If we want people to stay engaged with the world they live in, we can’t keep outsourcing understanding. We have to design it.
Anna
