Welcome to your weekly check-in. Every week, The Scale Signal cuts through the noise to give you one perspective shift, so you can scale smarter without losing your sanity.

This week, I want to talk about something most founders don’t measure, don’t question, and rarely notice until it starts bogging everything down. Complexity.

Let's go.

~ 9 minute read

I came across an AI app recently that, at first glance, felt like a good idea. The founders had spent more than a year building it. Big team. Lots of hype. They had just launched.

In effect, it pulls together all your communication channels into one place. Email, Slack, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Telegram. The premise is simple: every team member receives hundreds of messages across platforms and things quickly spiral. So everything flows into a single interface, and the AI highlights what’s urgent, what needs replying to first, what deserves attention.

On paper, it makes sense. But something about it made me quite uncomfortable.

And then it clicked. It wasn’t the AI, it was what it revealed.

We keep adding layers. A new shiny tool. A new channel. A new messaging platform. A new workflow. A new dashboard. A new bot. Conversations multiply. Teams use their own tools. Data gets scattered. Context fragments. Things slow down.

It’s almost as if we reflect our own attention disorder inside the organisations we build.

And now, with AI, we’ve found a way to manage the mess by adding another layer to manage the stack.

It reminded me of that messy sideboard everyone has. The flat looks tidy. You open the cupboard and everything falls out onto the floor. You close it quickly and pretend it’s fine.

And then I had another uncomfortable thought.

It felt a bit like the recycling story in the UK a few years ago. We all carefully sorted our waste, paid our fees, felt responsible… and then discovered much of it was being shipped elsewhere. Out of sight. Out of mind. The surface looked clean. The problem was simply displaced, for a cost...

That’s kind of what this felt like.

We’re not simplifying. We’re relocating complexity.

And once I noticed it, I couldn’t unsee it. The number of AI tools trying to “streamline” the chaos by sitting on top of it is growing fast.

Growth compounds. Complexity doesn’t just compound faster.
It compounds invisibly.

And yet complexity might be the most underestimated cost sitting inside a founder-led business.

Most founders track revenue obsessively. Margins, CAC, churn, runway. But very few track complexity.

And even fewer question whether it is quietly slowing everything down.

🧠 The Founder’s Edge

Addition is often rewarded. More tools look sophisticated. More hires look like momentum. More automation looks modern. More output looks productive.

Subtraction rarely gets noticed. No one congratulates you for killing a feature. No one applauds you for removing three tools from your stack. No one posts about shutting down an initiative that no longer makes sense.

So we add.

And if I’m honest, I’ve done this too.

For a long time, complex felt more valuable than simple. The more intricate the system, the more serious it seemed. More moving parts felt like ambition. Simple felt almost exposed. As if it wasn’t robust enough. As if it wasn’t worthy enough.

Over time, that belief started to unravel. Simplicity is not naive. It’s disciplined and generally very intentional.

It requires saying no. It requires removing things that once felt important. It requires admitting that something you invested time, money or identity into no longer belongs.

Complexity, on the other hand, often happens by default. You add something because it helps in the moment. Then you add something else to support it. Then something else to manage it. None of it feels irrational in isolation.

But very few founders build an explicit pruning discipline into how they operate. And without pruning, complexity does not stay neutral. It accumulates.

🧭 The Sanity Check

Let me make this clear: we do need to add in order to grow. We have to experiment. We try different routes. Different channels. Different tools. Different structures. That’s part of building. You don’t get from A to B in a straight line.

The problem isn’t the experimentation. It’s what happens after.

Very few founders consciously build in a phase of integration.

We test. We try. We add. Something works a bit. Something doesn’t. We tweak. We layer. And then we move on to the next thing.

What we often don’t do is stop and ask: What have we actually learned?

Given what we now know, is there a simpler way to get from A to B? Is there something we can remove? Is there something we only needed temporarily?

Instead, we keep stacking. And over time, that stack becomes the operating model.

Over time, that shows up in very specific ways.

A decision that should take a day takes three weeks because the context is fragmented. You hire to relieve pressure, but output doesn’t increase in proportion to cost. Teams optimise within their own lanes and drift apart. Subtle tensions start to appear. You spend more time aligning than moving. Nothing is visibly failing, but everything feels more complicated than it should. Over time people feel drained. Morale drops. Your best people start to leave.

I’ve been in rooms where everyone was working hard, intelligent, well-intentioned. Yet nothing moved quickly. In hindsight, it wasn’t talent that was missing. It was simplicity.

At some point, founders try to fix this by hiring. An operations lead. A COO. Someone to “organise the mess.”

But simplification is rarely a functional task. It cuts across teams. Across tools. Across how decisions are made. Across how data flows. It’s not just operational. It’s structural. It’s philosophical.

If the founder is still focused purely on growth, and no one is pausing to integrate and remove, the complexity doesn’t disappear. It just gets managed.

There’s also something else underneath this.

For the last twenty years we’ve been told that more data is better. More dashboards. More tracking. More insight. And in many ways, that’s true.

But more data without clear definition of what actually matters becomes noise. At some point, accumulation replaces clarity.

And unless someone makes it their responsibility to stop, step back, and reorganise what’s been built, or reaffirm what actually matters, complexity doesn’t slow down. It compounds.

In the best organisations I’ve worked with, the philosophical commitment to simplification is always initiated by the founder.

🚀 Freedom at Scale

If complexity compounds by default, subtraction has to be deliberate.

And just to be clear, I'm not talking about over-optimising. It’s not about over-engineering or obsessively tidying systems, that's just another extreme. And not a helpful one.

I'm talking about alignment.

Clarity of thought naturally translates into clarity of build. When thinking is clean, structure tends to follow.

A few practical shifts make a disproportionate difference:

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​This newsletter reflects my personal views and experience. It is not intended as professional advice. You are responsible for how you interpret and apply any ideas shared here, and Scale and Sustain accepts no liability for outcomes resulting from their use.