September 10, 2026

The Tax You Pay for Moving Fast

Last week I spoke to a tech leader who said something I hear all the time, just with better branding.

'We’ve invested heavily in improving velocity.'

Lovely phrase. Sounds serious. Sounds board-friendly. Sounds like everyone should nod while holding an oat flat white.

What it actually meant was this: they had added more tools, more approval points, more dashboards, more stand-ups, more tracking, and somehow ended up with less clarity than they had six months earlier.

Classic.

We’ve built a working world that worships speed, then acts surprised when complexity sends the bill. And trust me, it always sends the bill.

TechRadar recently explored this in The hidden tax of complexity and speed, making the point that new processes and tools bring both admin and mental costs, and that any gains only really show up when organisations rethink process and invest in training. Source: TechRadar, https://www.techradar.com/pro/the-hidden-tax-of-complexity-and-speed

I think that is exactly right, but I’d push it further.

The problem is not just that complexity has a cost. It is that most businesses massively underestimate how much talent, energy and momentum they burn by pretending complexity is progress.

And if you are hiring into Infrastructure, Cloud, Data, BI, Engineering or Cyber, this matters more than you think. Because the hidden tax of complexity does not just hit productivity. It wrecks hiring, retention and decision-making too.

Complexity loves wearing a progress costume

Most complexity does not arrive looking dangerous. It arrives looking sophisticated.

A new workflow tool. A new reporting layer. A new approval rule. Another weekly meeting because someone, somewhere, once missed an update.

None of this sounds outrageous in isolation. That is the trick.

Complexity rarely kicks the door in. It slips into the building one harmless-looking decision at a time.

Then six months later, your best engineer is spending half their week updating tickets. Your data team is manually fixing reporting logic no one fully owns. Your cyber lead is attending three governance meetings to make one decision. Your managers are drowning in process while calling it maturity.

That is not maturity. That is admin in a blazer.

Speed without simplification is just chaos with better PR.

The real cost is cognitive, not just operational

Most leaders can spot a budget cost. Fewer spot a cognitive one.

But mental load is where this gets expensive.

Every extra tool, workflow or handoff asks people to remember more, switch context more often, and navigate more ambiguity. The visible process might look tighter. The invisible experience feels heavier.

And heavier teams do not move faster. They just tire out more professionally.

Here is what the hidden tax tends to look like in practice:

• Decision fatigue from too many systems and conflicting priorities

• Context switching that shreds deep work

• Training gaps where people have access to tools but not fluency

• Duplicate processes because nobody trusts the original one fully

• Ownership fog where issues bounce between teams like a cursed beach ball

This is where I think many businesses get caught out. They buy capability but ignore absorption.

Just because a team has a new platform does not mean it has a new capability. Sometimes it just has a shinier headache.

Hiring won’t save a broken operating model

This is the bit recruiters are meant to be diplomatic about.

I’m not always diplomatic.

If your business is creaking under tool sprawl, muddled process and decision bottlenecks, hiring another smart person is not a fix. It is often just feeding talent into a maze.

I see this all the time.

A company says it needs a brilliant Head of Data, Cloud Architect, Cyber Security Manager or BI Lead. Fair enough. But once you scratch below the job spec, what they often really need is one of two things:

• A simpler operating model

• The courage to stop doing some things

Great hires can absolutely transform a business. That is the whole point. But expecting one person to outperform a bad system is like hiring Lewis Hamilton and then giving him a shopping trolley.

He may still impress you. He will not thank you for it.

This matters for retention too. Strong candidates are not just assessing salary, title and tech stack. They are assessing friction.

They ask themselves:

• Can I actually get things done here?

• Is decision-making clear?

• Will I spend my time building value or navigating nonsense?

The best people have options. If your environment feels like digital spaghetti, they will clock it fast.

Speed needs subtraction, not just acceleration

When leaders want more speed, they usually ask, 'What do we need to add?'

Wrong first question.

The better question is, 'What can we remove?'

This is the part businesses resist because subtraction feels less exciting than transformation. You cannot exactly launch a leadership roadshow around the theme of deleting stuff.

But deletion is often where the gains are.

If you want a practical framework, use this one with your leadership team:

The S.T.O.P. test

• Simplify: Which processes have become too clever for their own good?

• Train: Where have we rolled out tools without proper enablement?

• Own: Is responsibility clear, or are tasks living in the cracks?

• Purge: What can we remove completely with little downside?

That last one is gold.

Most businesses are carrying a graveyard of legacy rules, reports, meetings and systems that nobody loves, but nobody quite dares to kill. They sit there quietly draining time and confidence.

If you are serious about speed, purge ruthlessly.

Training is not a nice-to-have. It is the price of admission

One of the strongest points in the TechRadar piece is that new tools and processes only deliver gains when businesses reevaluate workflows and train people properly. Spot on.

Too many companies treat training like the garnish. It is not garnish. It is dinner.

Without training, your expensive new system becomes one of three things:

• Underused

• Misused

• Quietly resented

None of these are great outcomes, unless your strategy is to create low-level organisational rage.

Training also signals something deeper. It tells people this is a real change, not another half-baked initiative that leadership will forget by quarter-end.

And let’s be honest, teams have seen enough of those to become suspicious on sight.

If you want adoption, do not just announce the tool. Train the behaviour. Rework the process. Clarify the why. Show people what good looks like.

Otherwise you have not changed the system. You have just expanded the confusion.

Questions leaders should ask before adding anything

Before you introduce a new tool, workflow or reporting requirement, run these questions internally:

• What problem are we actually solving?

• What existing friction will this remove, not add to?

• Who owns this once the launch buzz disappears?

• What training will people need to use it well?

• What can we stop doing as a result?

• How will we know this improved outcomes rather than just activity?

If there are fuzzy answers to those questions, pause.

Because fuzzy thinking is how businesses end up with immaculate software estates and exhausted employees.

What smart companies do differently

The best-run businesses I work with are not obsessed with looking complex. They are obsessed with being clear.

They do a few things consistently well:

• They design for usability, not just control

• They hire people into problems worth solving, not into avoidable chaos

• They challenge process creep early, before it calcifies

• They invest in enablement, not just implementation

• They understand that simplicity scales better than bureaucracy

This is especially important in fast-growth environments. Start-ups and scale-ups often think process is the adult suit they need to put on. Fair enough. But if you overdress too early, you lose the very agility that made you dangerous in the first place.

There is a difference between growing up and becoming stiff.

One builds resilience. The other builds meetings.

Conclusion

Here is the truth.

Speed is not free. Every new layer of process, tooling or oversight creates a tax. Sometimes that tax is worth paying. Often it is not.

The winners are not the companies that move fastest in a straight line on a slide deck. They are the ones that know when to simplify, when to train, and when to stop mistaking complexity for progress.

If your team feels slower despite all the upgrades, do not assume you need more people first.

You might need less baggage.

And if you are hiring into a business carrying too much friction, fix that early. The market is too competitive, and good people are too sharp, to waste them on systems that fight back.

Moving fast is great. Moving fast while dragging a wheelie bin full of unnecessary process behind you is a different sport entirely.

I know which one I’d rather recruit for.

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