The Simplicity Trap

Over the last decade we've been forced to adapt to information overload, character limits, and increased interruptions — such that only the sharpest hooks can grab us, the shortest snippets be digested, the simplest messages be remembered. Gloria Mark's research over two decades suggests attention spans are in decline, now averaging just 47 seconds on any screen.

Simplicity, therefore, has become something of a creed, particularly for those growing businesses and brands that are reliant on cut-through.

In many regards, simplicity is good and needed. It breeds clarity, accessibility, less waste.

But I worry we're taking it too far.

For entrepreneurs and business leaders, there's no shortage of schools of thought vying for attention. Pick a lane. Define a niche. Frame a problem. Sharpen your hook. Standardise. Digitise.

The groundswell of business gurus pushing simplicity to ever-more extreme and algorithm-tailored levels worries me. The simplicity that's worked over the last few years to drive exponential growth in revenues, reach, and follower counts might be eroding the very sustainability of our businesses. Our effort, attention, and capital is being invested into models that increasingly look strategically fragile.

The narrow moat problem

The current entrepreneur's mantra goes something like this: stand for one thing, repeat it until the algorithm smiles and sends you viral, and make sure you personally have so little to do with the business that it can scale in a flash.

But this practice of digging a narrow trench to achieve oversized growth doesn't feel sustainable. The moat feels too narrow, the growth verging on extractive. One algorithm shift or change in market taste, and what is there to fall back on?

Consider the other end of the spectrum. The five largest global companies — NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, and Amazon — average 38 years old and each is a conglomeration of business lines. Packaging what they do into a single neat hook is tricky.

The research supports this too. Lead and Disrupt (O'Reilly and Tushman, 2016) argues that ambidexterity is required to prevail over time. One of our fastest-growing clients quickly diversified away from a single product line, layering in new revenue streams and capabilities. It's part data company, part software provider, part hardware designer, installer, and manager. It's leaving its competitors in the dust.

When algorithms reshape business

The pressure for simple communication seems to have gone too far. It's moved past making things digestible and is now playing to an ever lower bar of human intellect and time. You can only have one lane. Be known for one thing. Repeat one message.

And that's not just governing marketing and communications any more. It's impacting what businesses actually do. What they're willing to tackle. What they're capable of becoming.

Because the real world doesn't come in neat packages. The problems we're facing today — climate change, deglobalisation, ageing demographics, AI, inequalities — none of them are simple, nor exist in isolation. The only way to make things better is to have businesses and people that think and move beyond just one narrow lane.

We need businesses capable of holding multiple threads at once. Of seeing the connections between things. Of building solutions that work across the messy, interconnected reality we're actually living in. But you can't build that kind of business if you're optimising for a 47-second attention span and a viral hook.

Complexity as the human advantage

Maybe the emerging competitive advantage isn't so much clarity as curiosity. The human ability to hold contradictions, think across disciplines, explore the grey areas, find new connections in the complexity that AI so frequently claims it's stripping out.

We're being urged to stop "selling time for money." But what's so bad about exchanging your time for meaningful work? Spending your energy solving real, knotty problems with clever, like-minded people might just be the most valuable contribution any of us can make.

Those diverse, multi-faceted, capably complex people and businesses probably won't be going viral or hitting six-figure followers. But they'll be the ones less susceptible to being replaced by AI. Less likely to be shoved into irrelevance by a changing trend. More capable of adapting when the world shifts beneath their feet.

The world is complex. Becoming more so, not less. The businesses that recognise this complexity and try to respond — exploring potential paths through uncertain futures, building something that matters for the world — are likely the ones that last.