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Alla Adam is a City Builder, Author, & Pilot at Adam Impact Institute.

gettyAfter more than 13 years of working together, Jordan rarely surprises me. This time he did.

Jordan is a heart surgeon and a healthtech founder. He has conducted over 1,200 heart surgeries and built through enough technology shifts, market changes and assorted startup chaos that uncertainty itself doesn’t particularly scare him.

AI was different. He had been watching what it could already do, and suddenly the number of possible futures for his company had multiplied. What should they build? What should they stop building? Which parts of the business would become more valuable? Which could become irrelevant? Should they move now or wait six months?

“I don’t know, Alla. It’s complicated.”

Yes. And complicated is a dangerous place for a leader to stay.

Complexity Loves CompanyOne problem rarely makes a business complicated; five reasonable answers do.

You could expand into the new market and protect the old one. Build the new product and improve the existing one. Hire more people and automate. Serve your largest customers and chase the emerging segment.

Each choice can be defended. Put them together, and you have a company attempting to move in 10 directions at once.

AI makes this, well, complicated because the cost of trying things keeps falling. Ideas that once required months, engineers and considerable money can be tested much faster. “We could,” therefore, appears far more often in conversations than it used to.

That doesn’t mean you should, though. As possibility becomes cheaper, restraint becomes more valuable. And the leadership skill I’m talking about is simplification.

Decide What Gets To WinWhen something feels complicated, ask yourself: If only one thing could go right here, what would I choose?

Not what the board, team, customers and investors would collectively prefer. What result matters enough that other good results may have to wait?

This is difficult because leaders are trained to reconcile competing interests. Often, that’s exactly the job. But there are moments when reconciliation creates nonsense.

If your top priority is getting a product to market in 90 days, perfection can’t be on the same scale. If cash preservation is existential, every interesting experiment cannot remain sacred. If you’re rebuilding trust with one major customer, your calendar should have a sole focus for a while.​

A priority that loses every argument isn’t a priority. And without one, you’ll go nowhere.

Make The Problem BiggerThis sounds backward, but when you can’t decide, make the goal harder. A small goal leaves room for dozens of plausible routes. A much larger one leaves only the best.

Ask how to improve revenue by 5%, and you can spend the afternoon discussing pricing, marketing, partnerships, hiring, upselling and probably 17 other ideas. Ask how you would triple revenue without tripling headcount, and most of those ideas become irrelevant, pronto.

The same thing happens with time. “What should we accomplish this year?” is about everything. “What must happen no matter what 60 days from now?” is very specific.

A sufficiently ambitious goal, paired with a sufficiently uncomfortable deadline, forces choices that analysis won’t.

You can’t go up without going through. Sometimes through is the part where you finally kill perfectly decent ideas.

Find What You’re Secretly ProtectingHere’s where complexity becomes more complicated: Sometimes the extra goal isn’t on paper. You say you want to simplify the product, but you also want to preserve the feature you invested so much time building. You want profitability, but you don’t want to lose the status attached to your impressive headcount. You want faster decisions, but you still want every important decision to pass through you. You want to change strategy, but you don’t want investors to think the previous strategy was wrong.​

None of those concerns is ridiculous. That’s precisely why they survive. But what if you ask: What am I trying to protect besides the result I say I want? Maybe it’s money already spent. Maybe it’s reputation. Maybe it’s somebody’s feelings. Maybe it’s your own ego. Maybe it’s an opportunity you’re afraid won’t come back.

Once you name it, you can decide whether it deserves to stay.

Subtraction Is A Business SkillMost leaders respond to uncertainty by adding. Another meeting. Another feature. Another analysis. Another contingency plan. Eventually, the plan looks like something a kid would build if they didn’t have Lego for something decent.

Try the opposite. Which customer no longer fits? Which project would you never start today if nobody had already spent money on it? Which opportunity becomes an obvious no once your main goal is clear?

Subtraction feels dangerous because every removal closes a possibility. But that’s the point.

AI Will Make Saying No More ExpensiveWe’re entering an unusual period in business. The number of things companies can do is expanding much faster than the number of things they can do exceptionally well. That changes the job of a leader.

For years, technological advantage meant gaining access to capabilities your competitors didn’t have. But now, many of your competitors will have access to the same tools. They can generate. Build. Analyze. Personalize. Automate. So can you.

The advantage moves elsewhere: deciding what deserves to exist in the first place. When almost anything becomes possible, possible stops being a good standard.

Raise The BarJordan (whose name has been changed for confidentiality) and I didn’t need to predict exactly how AI would reshape healthtech. Nobody can.

We needed to decide what mattered most to his business now. Once we did, his AI scare became much smaller. There were still dozens of things AI could change. He simply didn’t need to act on all of them.

That’s what simplification does. It reduces how much complexity you allow into your decisions. Fewer priorities. Fewer competing goals. Fewer things requiring your attention simply because they exist. The higher the bar, the fewer things make it over.

So when your business feels complicated, resist the temptation to add. Raise the bar. Then let everything that can’t clear it go.​

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