Whatever the source, no one intentionally creates complexity. But unintentionally, all managers are complexity creators. There are, in fact, dozens of ways that managers cause complexity without even realizing it. Here’s a quick example:

The president of a large company asked his chief financial officer (CFO) to put together a weekly, nonfinancial “activity report” so that he could keep up on key developments within each part of the firm. To produce this report, the CFO asked each business head to provide him with a few highlights each week about progress within their departments. Most of the department heads then asked their subordinates to do the same—and the request cascaded down through several more levels. Each week, the information had to be aggregated and summarized before it reached the president, and soon a number of people throughout the organization were spending a considerable amount of time on the report. The president of course was oblivious to the “information industry” that had sprung up around him, thinking that the request was simple and straightforward.

It’s easy to blame the president for creating such a complex process. But managers at all levels colluded with him in taking a simple task and turning it into a time-consuming chore. None of these business leaders felt that they could sketch out the requested weekly highlights without input from their teams, which led to the waterfall of data requests. And no one at the levels below them pushed back. So despite lots of quiet complaints, the process gradually took on a life of its own.

Unfortunately, this isn’t an unusual case. Much of the complexity that managers struggle with stems from these seemingly innocuous, well-intentioned demands, which then mushroom into time-consuming processes that provide little value for the firm.

The challenge for all of us is to make these invisible sources of complexity more visible. To do this we first need to admit to ourselves that we are indeed complexity creators—whether we initiate it directly or collude with others to perpetuate it.

Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Robert H. Schaffer & Associates, a Stamford, Connecticut consulting firm. His latest book is Simply Effective.