It’s Complicated

What is the psychological reason for complicating things that should be simple?

It’s usually rooted in perfectionism. If a perfectionist has a choice to make, the fear of making a mistake leads to a firehose of complexity. It should only take three steps so let's add some extra steps to anesthetize the unpredictability.  Sophistication creates an illusion of control. 

“You have no idea how long I’ve been working on this.”

Sometimes it leads to the “best” solution, but at what expense? A solution that is good would have taken 10% of the time and kept the project moving forward.

Make sure you have some haphazard people in the room or you’ll likely be optimizing things that shouldn’t exist.