Complexity is real. Complication is optional.
At a glance
- Challenge
- Growth by acquisition brings products, markets and capability. Without strong “one company” integration behind it, it also brings duplicate processes, systems and approval chains, layer upon layer, until the same task can be done three different ways depending on which legacy system you happen to meet.
- Andrew’s role
- I was programme executive lead for a CEO-sponsored enterprise simplification and operating-model programme, designed from the start as a time-limited movement rather than a permanent corporate function.
- Scale / context
- A global biopharmaceutical company with more than 90,000 people and revenues of around 42 billion euros, built through decades of acquisition and growth
- What changed
- Better spans, fewer layers, faster decisions and higher engagement across the enterprise, and simplification that became something the organisation did for itself rather than a corporate campaign.
The office manager in Australia had been trying for ten days to get a picture hung. She could not work out how to raise the supplier in the procurement portal, or how to pay them once she had. In the end her husband came in at the weekend and hung it himself.
A picture, a wall, and ten days
That story came out of a focus group, and it is the one I still tell, because nothing in it is hard. A picture, a wall, a hook. What defeated her was a company of more than ninety thousand people with no way to do a small thing quickly.
We started before there was a programme or a team. The VP of Finance for Corporate Functions and I ran focus groups across countries and functions and asked one deliberately unglamorous question: where does this place get in your way? Nobody talked about strategy. They talked about the fifteenth field on a form, the second approval that duplicated the first, the system that could not see the other system.
One answer I have quoted ever since. We are following processes that are six years old, invented by someone who left three years ago, and nobody has asked why. That is not a process problem, it is a permission problem: everybody could see it, and nobody felt they had the standing to stop it.
A heart transplant and an expense claim
The distinction matters, because the two need opposite treatment. A heart transplant is genuinely complex: it needs specialised expertise and no amount of tidying will make it simple. An expense claim that needs three approvals across two systems is merely complicated: layers that accumulated because nobody was ever asked to remove one. Complex systems have to be managed. Complicated ones can be simplified. Cutting the wrong one is dangerous. Leaving the wrong one alone is expensive.
In a regulated business that line has to be drawn deliberately rather than assumed. Manufacturing, clinical and safety processes are genuinely complex and stay that way. The test we applied, process by process, was blunt: where would failure harm a patient, trigger a regulator or break a law, and where would it just mean somebody booked a more expensive hotel? Simplification is not deregulation, and a programme that cannot say that clearly will be stopped by the first person who thinks it is.
Three levels, and why one is never enough
Simplification usually gets attacked at one altitude. Fix the policy and nobody’s Tuesday changes; hand out productivity tips and you have made people more efficient at hitting the same wall. We ran it at three levels at once, and they are levels rather than stages.
Macro
The things that hit everybody and belong to nobody
Wallbreakers: a small group with a mandate to break through, because these needed authority rather than analysis.
Paying for events · mandatory learning · recruiting expenses
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These needed authority rather than analysis, so they went to a small group with a mandate to break through, and we called them Wallbreakers. We brought in Yves Morieux, whose work on organisational complexity I had been studying since Shell, to spend time with them.
Mid
What is complicated here is not what is complicated there
Trained simplifiers running sprints with intact teams, each team naming its own flavours of complication.
Ranked by impact against effort · sprints on the top three
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Closer to the old GE Work-Out. We trained a cohort of simplifiers in a method and put them in front of intact teams: a function, a country, a business unit. What is complicated in a Brazilian sales team is not what is complicated in a German plant, and a central team cannot know either.
Micro
One person, one wall, today
A self-serve diagnostic built on BCG’s eight approaches to mastering complexity, with curated interventions behind each one.
And a peer layer: colleagues posting what actually worked
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The interventions sat behind each dimension so that one person could apply them without asking anyone. And the part I liked best: a peer layer where people posted how they had actually simplified something, by dimension, so the next person hitting the same wall found a colleague who had already climbed it rather than a policy document.
Making it stick, which is harder than making it happen
Two things carried more weight than I expected.
The first was storytelling, and not as decoration. A policy change tells people what is now allowed; a story about a colleague who used it tells them it is real. The Volcano Awards made a handful of simplifications visible each cycle, along with the teams behind them. That is how a permission problem gets solved: not by announcing that people may act, but by showing them people who did.
The second was change management, because the failure mode is local. We simplified expenses globally and some finance teams kept their own process on top of the new one, which gives you the worst of both: a simpler global policy and a longer local journey.
Underneath both sat a shift in what the company expected of people. From strict compliance, where everything is pre-approved, towards trust and verification, where capable people are trusted to act and the checks happen afterwards. We put AI into expense approval, so around ninety per cent of manager approvals became automatic and only the ones that looked problematic were flagged for a person to look at: the check did not disappear, it moved to the exceptions. That means thoughtful risk-taking, and deciding case by case where common sense is allowed to beat policy. It needed the chief executive’s personal endorsement, and it had to be argued country by country, because the appetite for that is not evenly distributed.
What it delivered
80
simplifications at company level, the kind that need authority rather than effort
800
more inside countries and functions, designed by the people who lived with them
12,000
people carrying a simplification goal of their own
The last number is the one I care about most, because it is the one that says this had stopped being a programme. It was deliberately time-limited: success was never a permanent central team, it was the mindset outliving the mandate.
What I learned
Guiding principles
Simplify the complicated. Manage the complex. A heart transplant is complex, and no amount of tidying makes it simple. An expense claim with three approvals across two systems is merely complicated. Cutting the wrong one is dangerous and leaving the wrong one alone is expensive, and most programmes never make the distinction out loud.
Start with the pain, not the process map. A picture that took ten days to hang tells you more than a process inventory, and it gives people a reason to care that a flowchart never will.
Fix the policy and nobody’s Tuesday changes. Work only at the top and the rules change while the working week does not. Work only at the bottom and you make people more efficient at hitting the same wall. The three altitudes have to run at once.
Most of it is a permission problem. People can usually see the complication perfectly well. What they lack is the standing to stop it, which is why visible examples of colleagues doing so are worth more than another policy.
Simplification is not deregulation. In a regulated business, say plainly what is not up for simplification. A programme that cannot draw that line will be stopped by the first person who suspects it will not.
Know which doors swing both ways. Simplifying has a price, and it is worth paying where the door swings both ways: if the decision turns out wrong, you walk back through it. Where it only swings one way, patient safety, a regulator, the law, the controls stay and you say so out loud. Trusting people to act is not the absence of rules. It is knowing which rules were load-bearing.
An organisation is memory foam. Press it and it yields; take your hand away and it returns to the shape it had. A simplification announced centrally and absorbed locally has not happened, so the change has to be held in place long enough that the new shape is the one it springs back to.
Why it matters now
Volcano was never a cost exercise. It was about removing friction and giving people the accountability to decide: policies that had stopped making sense withdrawn, approvals cut, twenty-page documents turned into one, and common sense allowed to prevail wherever the risk allowed it.
Strip the labels off and what I do for a company is always two things: removing friction and creating distinction. Friction is whatever stands between your people, or your customers, and the thing they came for. Distinction is what makes the thing worth coming for at all. Complication attacks both at once, quietly, and it never arrives as a decision anybody made.
Every organisation is now being asked to move faster, absorb AI and keep good people from burning out at the same time. The ones managing it are not adding programmes, tools, layers and meetings. They are removing what stops their people doing the work.
Complexity is real. Complication is optional.