Other people's behaviour acts as a cue for what to do, buy, or believe.
More quotesSimplicity is senior work disguised as tidying.
Adding is politically easy. Every department gets a feature, every stakeholder a sentence, every risk another slide.
Removal forces a decision about what matters. One clear onboarding step helps somebody begin. Seven prominent options advertise internal compromise. A sales deck with one problem, one proof and one recommendation creates a decision; thirty slides create plausible deniability. A strategy with three genuine choices can settle trade-offs. A page of aspirations merely gives every team permission to carry on.
Minimalism can become its own silly religion. Customers do not need empty screens and cryptic icons; they need enough information to act confidently. Short copy that deletes the qualifier protecting the truth is not elegant. A stripped process that dumps complexity onto frontline staff has simplified the diagram, not the work.
Remove in rounds. Kill repetition. Combine overlaps. Challenge anything present because its owner attended the meeting. Then test the next cut: does understanding, trust or action suffer? If yes, stop. If nobody notices, keep cutting.
Removal has a useful brutality. When a proposition collapses after the adjectives leave, the adjectives were life support. When a process fails without a weekly status meeting, ownership was missing. Simplicity exposes structural weakness. That is why organisations praise it and resist it. The final result looks obvious; the argument required to get there was anything but.