There is a quote, often attributed to Einstein though probably misattributed, that goes: “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage, to move in the opposite direction.” I have spent fifteen years watching intelligent people make supply chains more complex, and I have done it myself. The pattern is always the same.
It starts with a reasonable desire for precision. A company grows. The product range expands. Someone decides the planning system needs another parameter, another rule, another exception. Each addition is logical in isolation. The new SKU requires its own safety stock calculation. The seasonal product needs a separate forecasting model. The key account gets a custom replenishment frequency. Each decision makes the system slightly more accurate and significantly more complex.
Then one day, three years later, nobody in the organization fully understands how the planning system works. The person who built the original logic has moved on. The exceptions have exceptions. The accuracy gains are real but marginal, and the complexity costs are enormous but invisible: slower decisions, more meetings to align, higher error rates that nobody can trace to a root cause because the system is too opaque to diagnose.
This is the complexity trap. You walk into it one reasonable decision at a time.
A planning model that is 95% accurate and understood by everyone will outperform one that is 99% accurate and understood by two people in a back office.
The Seduction of Precision
The root problem is that organizations consistently overvalue precision and undervalue clarity. A planning model that is 95% accurate and understood by everyone in the organization will outperform one that is 99% accurate and understood by two people in a back office. The 4% accuracy gap matters far less than the organizational gap in understanding, communication, and ability to respond when conditions change.
I saw this repeatedly during my years in supply chain management and consulting. A procurement category strategy with 47 slides and 12 decision trees will sit in a folder. One with three slides and a clear framework will actually get used. An S&OP process with 14 KPIs will generate beautiful dashboards that nobody acts on. One with four KPIs that everyone understands will change behavior.
The bias toward complexity is structural. In most organizations, the person who makes something more sophisticated gets rewarded. The person who simplifies something gets questioned. “Is that really enough?” “Are we not losing something?” The answer is usually yes, you are losing something. You are losing complexity that was costing you more than it was worth.
Six Products, Not Sixty
I think about this differently now that I run a bakery. At FIKA B\u2019LORE, we sell five to six bun varieties at any given time. Our menu fits on a phone screen. Our pricing is three numbers. Our delivery model is one sentence: we bake Friday, we deliver Friday.
This simplicity is not a limitation. It is a competitive advantage. Every customer understands our offer immediately. Every member of the team can explain it. Every new WhatsApp community we open gets the same clean proposition. There is no confusion about what we do, how we do it, or what it costs.
The temptation to add complexity is constant. Should we offer different sizes? Should we add a subscription model? Should we create tiered pricing for corporate orders? Each suggestion is reasonable in isolation. And each one would add a decision point, a communication burden, an operational branch. The compound effect of saying yes to all of them would be a business that is harder to run, harder to explain, and harder to scale.
The Swedish word for this is lagom: just enough, not too much, not too little. It is a cultural instinct that turns out to be operationally sound. A bakery with six products done perfectly is more valuable than one with thirty products done adequately. The constraint forces quality. The simplicity enables focus. And focus compounds.
Where to Be Complex
The answer is not to eliminate complexity entirely. Some problems are genuinely complex and require sophisticated solutions. The key is being deliberate about where you invest in complexity and where you insist on simplicity.
The framework I have found useful: be complex where you differentiate, be simple everywhere else. If your competitive advantage is in product formulation, invest complexity there. If it is in customer relationships, invest complexity there. But your planning system, your pricing structure, your internal communication, your reporting, all the infrastructure that supports the core but is not the core, should be as simple as you can make it without breaking.
At FIKA B\u2019LORE, the complexity lives in our recipes. Leanne\u2019s cardamom bun formulation is genuinely sophisticated, the result of professional training and hundreds of iterations. Everything around that formulation, the ordering system, the delivery model, the pricing, is deliberately simple. The complexity serves the product. The simplicity serves the business.
If you suspect your organization has fallen into the complexity trap, start with one question: can everyone in the company explain how your core process works? Not the details, not the edge cases. The main flow. If the answer is no, you have a simplicity problem. And simplicity problems compound just as reliably as the good kind of compounding, only in the wrong direction.