Deepak Batra explains why leaders often choose quantity to compensate for a lack of quality and clarity.
As a first-year consultant, I realised that the length of my daily update emails tended to be inversely proportional to the actual progress I made that day.
It was the instinct to use quantity to compensate for weak quality. The equivalent of emptier vessels being noisier.
A few years later, I watched a leader name a similar instinct before a monthly CEO review: “𝙄𝙛 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙘𝙖𝙣𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙫𝙞𝙣𝙘𝙚, 𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙛𝙪𝙨𝙚.”
The intent was to drown the CEO in details until the meeting ended in a “safe” review.
He had his team build a 30-slide deck for a 20-minute review. The opening slides had complex dashboards with a sea of data, doing the dual work of signaling intricate progress while obscuring the fundamental, trickier questions underneath.
The onus rested on the time-starved CEO to break through the clutter to get to the heart of it. That day, he did not have the mental bandwidth to do so. The strategy worked.
It’s rarely a conscious ploy like in the example above, but I’ve encountered several examples of quantity attempting to hedge for low clarity and quality:
- A CEO KPI scorecard with 50+ line items
- A “strategic roadmap” with 40+ projects, ranging from 2 man-hours to 2 man-years, all mixed up together
- Updates celebrating 20+ A/B tests in 48 hours, with faint learnings, if any
A recent client had a directive that resonated well with me: “No review to have more than 10 slides, and not a word anywhere that didn’t serve a purpose.”
It was excruciating and tedious to follow for the teams, but decisions came faster and with greater alignment.
Blaise Pascal closed one of his Provincial Letters in 1657 with a line: “𝙄 𝙝𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙢𝙖𝙙𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙨 𝙡𝙚𝙩𝙩𝙚𝙧 𝙡𝙤𝙣𝙜𝙚𝙧 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙣 𝙪𝙨𝙪𝙖𝙡, 𝙗𝙚𝙘𝙖𝙪𝙨𝙚 𝙄 𝙝𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝙝𝙖𝙙 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙩𝙞𝙢𝙚 𝙩𝙤 𝙢𝙖𝙠𝙚 𝙞𝙩 𝙨𝙝𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙚𝙧.”
Simple is afterall, harder than complex.
The 30-slide deck bought a pass on a verdict. The 10-slide deck demanded one.
Unnecessary complexity imposes heavy penalties on decision velocity.
In a way, simplicity is the most exposing thing a leader can put in front of a room.
Which is why many don’t.