Elegant Simplicity: Does your organisational culture reward simplification or complexity?

As has already been alluded to in the Elegant Simplicity series, a vital dimension of designing and developing organisations for elegant simplicity includes attending to the cultural dimension and the extent to which ‘the ways things get done around here’ either explicitly or implicitly reward simplification or complexity.

I’ve spent most of my career working inside pharmaceutical companies – from large multinationals to early-stage biopharma’s – and want to use my experience of this industry sector to bring to life how the cultural component can be a major determinant of achieving elegant simplicity. Or not.

It strikes me that Pharma, possibly like other heavily technical and regulated industry sectors, operates with some potentially competing or opposing mindsets and beliefs that result in either rewarding complexity or simplicity. I will focus on two specific, dominant mindsets that I have observed:

1. The Technocratic Mindset (complexity rewarding)

• Expertise is currency, especially in R&D
• Precision is essential, ambiguity is dangerous
• “More data” is always better than “less data”
• Dense analysis is considered as thoroughness
• Heros are born out of firefighting crises (which were themselves created by unnecessary human-made complexity!)

This mindset naturally celebrates complexity because complexity signals rigour, intelligence, and sophistication.  Mastering complex problems becomes a sign of intelligence and a status symbol with associated power. Clinical, regulatory, and medical teams often produce enormous slide decks full of data tables, caveats, and footnotes with the implicit message being, ‘If it’s not complex, it’s not credible.’ Other symbols and artefacts that reveal this type of logic include: necessitating overly long and detailed pre-reads; an abundance of corporate jargon and acronyms that require new joiners to ‘learn the language’ to appear smart; necessitating multiple people and layers of approval for decisions; a reluctance to stop and kill projects; the sacred 200-page SOP manual; individual OKRs where the quantity of objectives is privileged over the quality of a few, critical outcomes; etc.

2. The Essentialist Mindset (simplicity rewarding)

• Discernment, focus, and stripping away the non-essential
• Valuing pragmatic action and usability
• Clarity and repeatability of Manufacturing processes
• Quality systems needing unambiguous processes
• Cross functional teams need shared understanding e.g. via standardisation
• Patients need clear instructions

This mindset rewards elegant simplicity because simplicity creates clarity and focus, reduces noise and error, and makes decisions easier. Some of the world’s most innovative companies publicly obsess over simplicity (e.g. Apple, Toyota, Dyson), and you can see also this same obsession inside pharma organisations, especially via the actions and behaviours of leaders: expressing strategy on a single page so that anyone can understand and explain it; regularly bringing people together to make sense of complex situations collectively; instigating quarterly process / project ‘pruning’ exercises that remove organisational activity and not add to it; conducting root cause analysis (e.g. 5 Whys) that strip away noise from complex problems; minimising the number of formal policies in favour of fewer rules and higher trust where employees are treated as adults rather than children.

Implications

Pharma, like many other industries, is an inherently complex business comprised of a diverse set of organisational capabilities that need to operate within a complex macro environment comprising of regulations, geopolitics, societal expectations, etc. As a result, multiple internal micro-cultures often develop over time that are underpinned by different mindsets that may at times seem to oppose or compete. The trick therefore for leaders of these organisations is to be able to ‘see the wood from the trees’ and recognise the cultural cues that often hide implicitly underneath the ways-of-working that they themselves design and uphold. They can do this by asking themselves the question: “Do our current ways of working help to bring clarity, focus, and drive high performance or do they unnecessarily create complication, distraction, and undermine the effectiveness of our organisation?”.

Sometimes answering these types of question may necessitate a reframing that legitimises simplicity in a culture that often equates complexity with credibility. It may require shifting expectations and moving away from the production of 100 slide decks, dense protocols, and jargon heavy cross-functional updates. It might warrant explicitly rewarding different organisational behaviours e.g. teams that reduce steps in a process without compromising quality. It could result in advocating a ‘pruning mindset’ where every new process / project must identify which existing process / project it replaces.

These practical, culturally intelligent leadership moves acknowledge the reality of the complexity inherent in pharma whilst at the same time draw overt attention to the organisational habits that sometimes over celebrate it.

Tim Haynes is an Organisation Design & Development specialist with close to three decades of experience working in global pharmaceutical and energy companies. Having built and led several HR COE teams over the years, including in People Data & Analytics, he is passionate about bringing together the worlds of quantitative as well as qualitative data to create lasting change in organisations. In May 2025 he set up his own business – www.qq-od.com – and now consults independently as well as with partners to design and develop high performing organisations.