When a product or team starts failing, the instinct is to add: more process, more meetings, more metrics, more oversight. Rarely do leaders ask what to remove. The 14th-century logician William of Ockham built his famous razor not as a rule about simplicity for its own sake, but as a discipline against 'explanatory bloat' — the tendency of minds under pressure to multiply causes beyond necessity, because complexity feels like thoroughness. Developmental psychologist Robert Kegan, studying adult cognition at Harvard, identified a parallel trap he called 'immunity to change': the hidden commitments and competing assumptions we pile onto a problem that make our solutions self-defeating before they begin. Together, these two thinkers illuminate something specific about leadership: the layers of explanation, structure, and intervention you've added to a struggling system may themselves be the system's problem. The most decisive thing you can do this Friday isn't to build a better roadmap. It might be to run an audit — not of what's missing, but of what's accumulated.

Name one process, meeting, or metric you added in the last quarter to fix something — that hasn't fixed it. What assumption justified adding it, and is that assumption still true?

Drawing from Scholastic Philosophy / Developmental Psychology — William of Ockham (Summa Logicae, c. 1323) and Robert Kegan (Immunity to Change, 2009)