Always find ways to simplify. A reason organizations struggle to value ‘simplify’ is that it pushes against all sorts of social factors. Smart people want to signal they’re smart. In government people compete to denigrate ideas as ‘simplistic’, the ultimate insult, and propose ‘a more sophisticated alternative’ (which often makes problems worse). Saying ‘we can bin all this complexity with a simple alternative’ signals you’re a hooligan outsider. The fact that high performance entities strive for simplification at higher levels of abstraction is alien.

People like Bezos and Steve Jobs reward finding ways to simplify, to abstract away unnecessary complexity, to strip processes and abolish them.

via Dominic Cummings