I recently witnessed an unreal case of over convoluting while tackling an issue. We had this project where the solution adopted was excessively complicated. In retrospect, this solution might have been chosen precisely because it was complicated, thus building a complex process made us feel smart even though it did not help to efficiently tackle the initial issue. Needless to say we were not as clever as we thought we were, many unpredicted edge cases appeared and we had to make efforts to fix these unexpected issues. Second was the on-boarding of new comers who frankly had a hard time getting used to the necessary complexity. As I reflect back on our approach and try to find out what could have been done to do it better, I realize that the main reason for our failure was this tendency to build complex and smart systems.