Do You Overcomplicate Things?

An edited version of this article appeared in Forbes Coaches Council

Do you overcomplicate things? During a recent strategy session with a client, his mind spiraled the minute a strategy was mentioned. His thoughts went into overdrive, trying to formulate a complete plan ready to execute. This led to his next realization that he would need to pull together mountains of data and perform a full data analysis of what was or was not working to justify even incremental changes within his org.  In short, he had a vision that quickly morphed into a complex if-then strategy, creating a Herculean-sized decision tree with nodes branching far beyond easy comprehension.

This client wanted to wrap their hands around a whole project before even starting, and it’s something I notice I fall into myself. The challenge with this tendency is that it often overcomplicates things before any action is taken – leading to potentially wasted hours.

If you want to avoid the same trap, here’s my advice.

Dr Jo’s 3 Simple Steps To Avoid Overcomplicating Something New

1. Succinctly define what success looks like  – at the 1-year, 6-month, and then 1-month mark: If you are unable to describe your desired short- and long-term outcomes in a couple of short sentences, you might be building the perfect path to nowhere special. Before you start any new endeavor, concisely lay out your success criteria (side note: earlier timeframes also help you identify when to pull the plug or change tacks.) Too many projects begin with vague goals such as  “grow the business” or “streamline processes” with no identifiable metrics to help you gauge progress. Not every important project will have precise KPIs so it’s not worth twisting yourself and your team into a pretzel to create them, but vague intentions usually lead to unclear communications, lack of true alignment, and decisions that are harder to make.

Once you have the one-month goals – focus your energy there first. The truth is that action breeds insights and one month of action will lead to much more clarity for you and your team.

2. Ask yourself, what is this project more important than? (Note: not more urgent than. . .): What are you realistically willing to drop to get it done? If nothing, it’s a warning sign that your busy-ness itself is likely to overcomplicate this project. The sad fact of most organizations is that they have too many priorities. (Even orgs with fabulous strategic plans rarely prioritize according to these plans throughout the organization – but I digress.) For your plans to be simple, you need the time and space to execute them. Trying to move projects forward while multi-tasking during off-hours or boring meetings, only leads to more mistakes and confusion. If this new endeavor of yours is worth planning, it’s worth saying goodbye to (or delaying) something else you’re currently committed to.

3. Identify who can help you accomplish your goal: It’s easy to make plans as if you lived on the perfect desert island where traffic, sick days, and weather events rarely disrupt your plans. My reality is messier and I bet yours is too. It’s always smart to build buffer time into any project plans but it’s even smarter to build in people to enroll in the journey. Not only do the right people help with the heavy lifting, but they often see shortcuts that you might be blind to. Whenever I ask my techy son to help with a computer program, his solution takes 10x less time and works much more seamlessly. Who are the people with the right expertise that would streamline your path? Who else cares about the outcome you’re focused on? Someone recently said to me that if you can’t enroll someone on your mission, you might not be pursuing the right goals. Who are the people you want to invite to this mission?

Doctor, heal thyself – yes? I too struggle with a mind that puts out many ideas and plans that the rest of my body and life then tries to catch up to. When you notice that the pace of your mind and plans far exceeds your bandwidth, it’s a great opportunity to stop, breathe, and apply my steps to simplify, before returning into execution mode.