The sand is too dry, and Victor E. knows it before he even looks up. He is 56 years old, and his knees are pressed into the damp sediment of a coastline that doesn’t care about his deadlines. He’s been here for 6 hours, trying to stabilize the base of a cathedral that exists only in his mind and a few 16-page sketches tucked into his bag. Every time he tries to pack the grains, they crumble. It’s the water tension. Or rather, the lack of it. You can’t just add water and hope; you have to integrate it, grain by grain, until the chemistry of the sludge becomes a structural reality. If he forces it, the whole 26-pound structure will slide into a shapeless heap before the tide even reaches the 46-foot mark on the pier.

There is a specific kind of violence in that request. It’s the violence of erasure. It’s the demand that the complexity of a 6-month human struggle be flattened into a comforting narrative that fits between a header and a footer. We pretend this is about efficiency, but it’s actually about fear. Complexity is loud, messy, and uncooperative. It reminds us that we aren’t fully in control. A 6-word summary, on the other hand, is a sedative. It allows a leader to feel like they’ve mastered a problem they haven’t even begun to inhabit.

Recalibrating the Mental Model

Victor E. finally gives up on the spire. He stands up, wipes the grit from his palms, and stares at the ocean. He’s not angry; he’s just recalibrating. He tells me that sometimes you have to turn the whole process off and on again-not just the tools, but the mental model. He’s right. I realized in that boardroom that the executive wasn’t asking for a solution; he was asking for a shield. He wanted a slide that would protect him from the uncomfortable truth that our problem didn’t have a simple fix. If the solution can’t be explained in 6 seconds, we treat it as if it’s a failure of the presenter, rather than a characteristic of the problem itself.

This is where we go wrong. We have built an entire corporate culture on the myth of the ‘elevator pitch.’ We believe that if you can’t summarize it quickly, you don’t understand it. But some things-the truly important things-are fundamentally un-summarizable. You cannot summarize the grief of losing a 26-year-old business, and you cannot summarize the 106 different variables that cause a market to shift. When we demand simplicity, we aren’t just making things easier; we are making ourselves incapable of solving the very problems we claim to care about.

The 6-Day Crash

“

I had demanded a simple answer to a complex question, and the universe gave me exactly what I deserved: a simple disaster.

– A Lesson Learned in 2006 ($676/hr)

We see this same tension in the world of specialized expertise. Take vision, for example. We’ve been conditioned to think that a ‘good’ result is a single number-20/20. But anyone who has actually looked into the science of sight knows that a single metric is a lie. True clarity isn’t just about the 6th line on a wall chart; it’s about the health of the retina, the pressure in the eye, the way the brain processes contrast, and the subtle 16-degree shifts in peripheral awareness.

When you undergo an eye health check, you realize that they don’t settle for the ‘one-slide’ version of your health. They embrace the 46 different tests and the nuanced data because they know that your eyes are a complex ecosystem, not a binary pass-fail grade. They understand that to provide a real solution, you have to engage with the actual difficulty of the anatomy, not just the comforting simplicity of a quick prescription.

Speed Without Direction

But most organizations aren’t like that. They are terrified of the 126-page report. They want the 6-bullet version because it allows them to maintain the illusion of ‘speed.’ But speed without direction is just a faster way to hit a wall. When we force our experts to oversimplify, we are essentially asking them to lie to us. We are telling them, ‘I don’t want the truth; I want a story that makes me feel like I’m winning.’ And so, they provide it. They trim the 66 outliers that don’t fit the trend. They ignore the 16% margin of error. They give us a clean, beautiful, 6-point plan that is doomed from the start because it was built on a foundation of sand.

Victor E. is back on his knees now. He has fetched a fresh bucket of water, this time from a different part of the tide line where the mineral content is slightly higher. He is mixing it slowly. He isn’t looking for a ‘quick’ way to make the spire stand. He is respecting the physics. He knows that if he wants the 36-inch tower to hold its weight, he has to spend at least 46 minutes just prepping the base. There are no shortcuts in sand sculpting, just as there are no shortcuts in genuine leadership.

The Defense of Expertise

Why do we struggle with this? I think it’s because complexity requires a form of intellectual humility that is rare in high-stakes environments. To admit that a problem is complex is to admit that you might not have the answer yet. It’s to admit that the 6-month investigation was necessary, and that the 146 slides aren’t ‘fluff,’ but are the actual texture of the reality you are trying to manage. When the executive asks to ‘boil it down,’ what he’s really saying is, ‘Make me feel smart again.’ Because nothing makes a person feel more helpless than a problem they can’t fit on a single 16:9 screen.

I’ve started changing my approach. Now, when someone asks me for the ‘one-page summary,’ I give them a 6-page document instead. I tell them that the first page is a summary, but the other 5 are the ‘integrity check.’ I tell them that if they only read the first page, they are making a 26% informed decision. It makes people uncomfortable. They look at me like I’m being difficult. But I’ve realized that being ‘difficult’ is often just a synonym for being ‘accurate.’ If the world is a mess of 186 intersecting variables, I am doing you a disservice by telling you there are only 6.

The Symphony of Consideration

Think about the last time you were truly impressed by a piece of work. Was it because it was simple? Or was it because it managed to hold a vast amount of complexity in a way that felt coherent? A great symphony isn’t a single note played very loudly; it’s 76 different instruments working in a 46-minute tension that resolves into something meaningful. We don’t ask a chef to ‘boil down’ a 16-ingredient sauce into just salt and pepper. We appreciate the layers. We should bring that same reverence for layers into our boardrooms and our strategy sessions.

I watched Victor E. for another 56 minutes. He finally got the spire to hold. It wasn’t because he found a trick; it was because he stopped trying to make the sand do something it wasn’t ready to do. He worked with the 26 different factors of wind, moisture, and grain size. The resulting structure was beautiful, but more importantly, it was solid. It didn’t look ‘simple’ from the outside-it looked intricate, delicate, and deeply considered.

The Path Through Reality

We need to stop rewarding the people who give us the easiest answers. We need to start looking for the people who are willing to say, ‘This is a 6-part problem with 16 possible failure modes, and we need to discuss all of them.’ We need to stop hiding behind our bullet points and start standing in the rain of our actual reality. It’s cold out there, and it’s messy, and the data rarely ends in a round number. But that’s where the real solutions are buried.

I went back to that executive a few weeks later. I didn’t give him the 6-bullet slide. Instead, I brought him a physical map of the supply chain-a 56-inch printout that showed every single bottleneck and every single human being involved in the process. I didn’t talk; I just let him look at it for 6 minutes. The silence was uncomfortable. He looked at the 116 red dots representing delays. He looked at the 26 points of failure. And for the first time in 6 months, he didn’t ask me to boil it down. He asked, ‘Where do we start?‘

Clarity vs. Simplicity

That’s the question that matters. Not ‘How do I summarize this?’ but ‘How do I begin to engage with this?’ When we stop demanding simplicity, we start gaining clarity. And clarity is much more valuable than a clean slide deck. Clarity acknowledges the 186-page reality while still finding a path through it. It’s the difference between a 2D map and a 3D landscape. One is easy to fold, but the other is the only one that can actually lead you home.

Victor E.’s cathedral stood until the tide came in at 6:46 PM. It didn’t matter that it was temporary. What mattered was that it was true to its materials. It didn’t pretend to be made of stone; it was made of sand and water, held together by a 56-year-old’s refusal to oversimplify the physics of the beach. As the water hit the base, the structure didn’t crumble all at once. It dissolved slowly, layer by layer, revealing the internal supports he had painstakingly built into the core. It was complex until the very end.