Why people without skin in the game create needless complexity

Decision-Making

As we saw, a bureaucratized system will increase in complication from the interventionism of people who sell complicated solutions because that’s what their position and training invite them to do.

Things designed by people without skin in the game tend to grow in complication (before their final collapse).

There is absolutely no benefit for someone in such a position to propose something simple: when you are rewarded for perception, not results, you need to show sophistication. Anyone who has submitted a Scholarly paper to a journal knows that you usually raise the odds of acceptance by making it more complicated than necessary.

Complexity has a marvellous business model: the person selling it gets paid now; the person operating it gets headaches later. A simple recommendation looks dangerously small beside the fee. So an ordinary prioritisation decision acquires a proprietary framework, seven categories and a scoring layer that produces the answer everyone suspected before lunch. Apparent sophistication becomes the deliverable.

Software does the same thing. Every disputed edge case receives a setting. The designer avoids choosing, the sales pitch gains another feature and thousands of customers inherit a control they must understand forever. Indecision has been successfully converted into functionality. Some problems are genuinely complicated. A one-page answer can be glib, and simplicity fetishists are capable of removing the brakes because the controls looked cluttered. The issue is who experiences the consequences of each addition.

Watch the handover. During the sale, every component has a confident owner and a reason. Six months later, the client has three vendors, two passwords, one undocumented dependency and an invoice for “ongoing optimisation”. Complexity rarely arrives announcing itself as future admin. It arrives as reassurance. Let authors operate the process they created. Let product teams absorb the support caused by new options. Keep advisers attached long enough for outcomes to replace elegance. Skin in the game does not make people wise; it makes avoidable nonsense less comfortable. Then calculate the afterlife. How many decisions does this component improve? Who maintains it? What new error can it create? Which piece could disappear without changing the result?

The afterlife is part of a solution’s cost: every future human required to remember how it works, every support ticket and every renewal invoice. When nobody can name the maintainer, the complication is already an orphan.