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 somewhat of a creed, particularly for those growing businesses and brands – a challenge 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. To “graduate” from any of them, you’re expected to simplify your business into a neat and obvious package. 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 without making inconvenient demands on your time.

This is the thrust of all the key entrepreneur influencers I’ve seen and it trickles into established businesses through supply chains and the personal branding efforts of leaders.

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?

Smaller businesses should consider the evidence from the other end of the spectrum. The 5 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.

Or look at the research. Lead and Disrupt (Charles O’Reilly and Michael 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. We had quite the time of it trying to neatly slot them in to a single business type for their B Corp certification. But it’s leaving its competitors in the dust.

When algorithms reshape business

The pressure for simple communication seems (to me) 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. Use one incredible hook within the first 30 seconds to earn the right to be heard.

And that’s not just governing marketing and communications anymore. It’s impacting what businesses actually do. What they’re willing to tackle. What they’re capable of becoming. Instead of racing to push that bar down still further, this is the point where we need to stop and think about raising it again.

Because the real world doesn’t come in neat packages. The problems we’re facing today – climate change, deglobalisation, ageing demographics, AI, inequalities, late-stage capitalism economies – 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. This leans into systems thinking which Donella Meadows describes as the only way to tackle “wicked problems” in her work “Thinking in Systems”.

Otherwise we get niche, fragmented fixes that discount rather than multiply each other. A climate solution that ignores supply chain realities. A growth strategy that pretends demographics aren’t shifting. A brilliant innovation that solves one problem whilst creating three others.

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.

Building businesses that provide jobs for those clever people and challenge them with rich and complex real-world problems to solve might be the most valuable contribution a lucky few can make to shape our long term future.

Those diverse, multi-faceted, capably complex people and businesses probably won’t be going viral, hitting 6-figure followers, or extracting maximum possible value from every market move.

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 different uncertain futures, building something that matters for the world and not just for singular profits – are likely the ones that last.

Before we let algorithms and simplicity define us and our businesses, perhaps we should ask ourselves: are we building for the long term, or are we just building for the algorithm?

Because if it’s the latter, we might find ourselves with a business that’s perfectly optimised for a world that no longer exists…or perfectly set up to be replaced by a bot.

TL;DR: Simplicity has become a business religion, particularly in the start-up / personal brand space. One hook, one lane, one viral message. But the more we optimise for attention spans and algorithms, the more fragile our models become. Real advantage lies in embracing complexity: building businesses that can think, adapt, and connect across messy, interdependent systems. Clarity is useful…but curiosity is what keeps us human (and future-proof).