The Five-Year-Old’s Guide to Corporate Efficiency

June 2, 2025

I still remember dusting off an old book in the neighborhood library and noticing a quote on the first page:

“Simplicity Is the Ultimate Sophistication.”

I was seven, and it didn’t make sense to me. In fact, it confused me... I thought the more complicated something was, the more sophisticated it had to be. I needed to find out who said that, even though I had no idea who Leonardo da Vinci was at the time. I'm still not sure if the explanations convinced me back then, but at least I got to learn about da Vinci and his amazing life and inventions.

Some Rocket Scientists Prove the Point

Recently, I came across a side-by-side picture of rocket engines. On the left was Raptor 1, looking like a stainless-steel spaghetti monster. On the right was Raptor 3, looking (let’s be honest) pretty boring. Yet the "boring" version creates about 50% more thrust and weighs around half a ton less. Less complicated plumbing, more performance.

Engineers call this delete-before-optimize. Leonardo might have simply called it “ultimate sophistication.”

But Why Do Organizations Drift the Other Way?

If you spend a few weeks mapping processes in a big legal department (like I often do), you’ll notice things typically become complicated—more layers, more forms, and more people involved.

The Boston Consulting Group calls this disease complicatedness and links it to significant drops in productivity and profits. Why does complexity spread so easily?

• Audit buildup: Every new inspection adds a step that never goes away.

• Rare-case reaction: One unusual incident triggers multiple new approval steps.

• Temporary fixes: Teams patch their own issues but forget to remove the patch when the problem goes away.

Complexity rarely has one single cause. Usually, it's a result of a thousand small "just-in-case" decisions made by well-meaning people.

Curiosity as an Operating System

Here’s the habit that keeps me (mostly) honest: I call it the Five-Year-Old Test.

• Why do we do this step?

• Why do we do it that way?

• What breaks if we stop?

If I hear “Because we’ve always done it...” three times in a row, that step goes on the chopping block. Nine out of ten times, nothing breaks except the myth that complexity equals safety.

Unfortunately, many school systems train curiosity out of us (that's another rant for another day). But it just means we need to retrain ourselves to keep asking questions.

A Quick Tale of Corporate Archaeology

A Fortune 500 client once asked us to automate their month-end reporting chaos. Four analysts spent the last week of every month updating dashboards no one read.

We asked the annoyingly simple five-year-old question: “Who uses these?” After a long pause, the finance lead admitted he wasn't sure. When we insisted on checking further, we discovered 80% of the reports hadn’t even been opened in six months. Looking deeper, we found that the main dashboard had been created four years earlier because of a seasonal request by previous leaders who had since moved on.

We eliminated these forgotten reports, automated the few that mattered, and freed three analysts to focus on useful projects rather than copying and pasting Excel files at midnight.

A Few Useful Principles

• KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid): Created by the U.S. Navy in the 1960s to remind engineers that equipment must be easy enough to fix by sailors on a rolling ship deck—not just PhDs in a lab. [link]

• Delete-Then-Optimize: Rocket engineers remove unnecessary parts first, then fine-tune what's left. If this approach works for engines running at 3,000 °C, it can work for approving your invoices. [link]

• Harvard Business Review on Complexity: Old processes add friction faster than automation removes it, slowing down decisions and agility. [link]

Confession... and an Invitation

Hi, I’m Mori, and I’m an optimizer. Some kids collected trading cards; I collected unnecessary steps and tried making them disappear. Partly because little-me admired da Vinci, partly because I’m too lazy to maintain complicated systems, and mostly because life’s too short to deal with unnecessary complexity.

If you have a process, dashboard, or policy that looks like Raptor 1, let’s channel our inner five-year-olds and see if we can achieve a Raptor 3 result. Ask simple, obvious questions. Pull on that loose thread. Don’t be surprised if half the sweater unravels—and no one even misses it.

Simplify boldly. Your future self will thank you.

(Signing off, on a quiet Sunday evening.)

This article was originally on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/five-year-olds-guide-corporate-efficiency-mori-kabiri