A few years ago, a client came to us through our innovation hub. They had a space, a good one, and they needed help designing a floor plan that would attract the right kind of innovators. Budget was there. Timeline was there. The brief was precise and well-reasoned. I remember thinking how confident the whole request felt.
The trouble was, it was not a floor plan problem. What they needed to understand was why innovators choose to stay in a place, what makes an ecosystem self-sustaining rather than just well-furnished. That is a very different kind of challenge. And yet everything around this client (their consultants, their internal project team, the reporting structure above them) was organised to treat it as a solvable design question. The executive leading this initiative was smart and rigorous. They were also looking at the wrong problem. Both things were true at once.
This was not unusual. The pattern is common enough that it is worth asking why.
Complex versus complicated
Most senior leaders I work with know the vocabulary. Complex versus complicated, they have encountered it in strategy offsites, in books, probably in a consulting deck at some point. I am not going to over-explain the difference here. But knowing the words has not protected anyone I have worked with from the trap.
The short version: a complicated problem is a collection of solvable questions. There may be many of them, they may require deep expertise, and the coordination involved might be enormous. But each piece can, in principle, be isolated, addressed, and resolved. A complex problem resists that. The parts interact, the context shifts, and the act of intervening changes the problem itself. You cannot break it apart piece by piece without losing something essential. The difference is not one of degree. It is structural.
Most leaders would agree with everything I have just written. And yet misclassification happens constantly. The question that interests me is not whether executives understand the distinction, but why understanding it does not seem to help.
Why the downgrade happens
The reason, I think, is that misclassification is not primarily a thinking failure. It is an organisational one. The executive is not sitting alone in a room getting the categories wrong. They are surrounded by people and structures that benefit from the downgrade.
When a complex challenge gets reclassified as merely complicated, things start to move. Consultants can scope it. Boards can approve it. Teams can build project plans around it. Budgets get allocated, timelines get set, and everyone in the room feels the relief of forward motion. Complexity, by contrast, stalls the machinery. It asks for open-ended exploration in environments built for execution. It demands patience in cultures that reward decisiveness.
There is also a social dimension that does not get discussed enough. You do not want to be the leader who keeps asking difficult questions when everyone else is ready to move. The pull toward simplification is not something an executive consciously chooses. It comes from the board, from the team, from the consultants, from the reporting cycle, from the implicit expectation that leadership means having answers rather than sitting with questions. It operates on everyone in the room at the same time, and it is structural.
This is where most articles about complexity stop, having named the trap, then offering a framework to escape it. But the trap is not about how individuals think. It is about how organisations are built. That makes it considerably harder to address, although not impossible to recognise once you have seen it a few times.
Advisers are not exempt
I have to include myself in this, because it cuts against the positioning that someone in my role might be tempted to adopt, the clear-eyed outsider who sees the complexity everyone else is flattening.
The reality is less comfortable. When I simplify a challenge for a client, I look competent. The engagement feels productive, the client feels supported, and the project moves forward. When I insist on sitting with complexity, I risk looking like I do not have answers, or worse, like I am manufacturing difficulty to justify my involvement.
I have caught myself, more than once, reaching for the simpler framing because it would land better in the room. Not out of dishonesty, but out of a genuine desire to be useful, to give people something they can act on rather than something they have to hold. You need to simplify enough to motivate action but not so much that you misrepresent the problem, and I am not sure that ever resolves cleanly. It might be something you just learn to live inside of, adjusting constantly, never quite confident you have the balance right.
This is similar to something I wrote about when discussing authenticity in business. I argued then that there is no absolute authenticity, that it exists on a spectrum, and that pursuing it is worth doing even though you never fully arrive. The same applies here. There is no perfectly honest representation of a complex problem. There is only the commitment to not flattening it more than you have to, and the awareness that you are always flattening it at least a little.
What I do know is that the moment an adviser starts believing their own simplified version, the client loses the one person in the room whose job it was to protect the complexity of the problem. That is a quiet failure, and it happens more than most of us in this profession would like to admit.
Drawing the boundary
Every complex decision requires drawing a temporary boundary around what you are willing to consider. You cannot hold everything in view at once. The question is where you draw that line, and that placement is itself a high-stakes judgement call. Draw it too narrowly and you have converted the complex problem back into a complicated one (although it might not look that way to anyone in the room). Draw it too wide and you paralyse the organisation with a scope no one can act on.
In the case of the innovation hub, the shift happened when the client moved from asking “what floor plan do we need?” to asking “what makes innovators stay?” That was a boundary redraw. The problem did not get smaller. It got more honest. And with that honesty came a different set of considerations: community dynamics, the relationship between structured programmes and informal collision, the question of whether you can design emergence or only create the conditions for it.
I spent years in the UK studying mechanical engineering, and one of the things that stuck with me is how much of engineering is about defining the boundary of the system you are analysing. Get the boundary wrong and the maths is perfect but irrelevant. Get it right and the problem starts to reveal itself. Something similar happens in advisory work, although the boundaries are messier and the feedback loops are longer.
The skill, I have come to believe, is not in drawing the perfect boundary. There is no perfect boundary. It is in drawing one you can defend for now, while remaining ready when something outside it interjects and forces you to redraw. That readiness requires the kind of organisational patience that most structures are not built to reward.
None of this resolves neatly, and I think that is the point. The pressure to make complex problems simpler than they are is not a bug in how organisations work. It keeps things moving, it gives people roles they can execute, it turns ambiguity into deliverables. Fighting that pressure is not glamorous work.
What it takes, more than anything, is a willingness to commit to the harder version of the problem when every incentive around you is offering you the easier one. That commitment does not come from understanding the difference between complex and complicated (most leaders already understand it). It comes from somewhere more personal, a decision about what kind of work you are willing to do and what kind of discomfort you are willing to sit with. I suspect that is where the real work is, although I am still figuring out what that looks like in practice.
