There's a pattern emerging across British politics and beyond that deserves naming: we've become addicted to structural solutions that create more problems than they solve.

Watch what's happening with water companies, devolution proposals, and the broader infrastructure debate. Someone identifies a genuine problem. A real one. Water quality is terrible. Regional governance feels disconnected. Services are failing. Then the response arrives: a new framework, a fresh layer of oversight, another commission, a restructured authority.

The winning operators won't be the ones proposing the next institutional innovation. They'll be the ones who simplify the existing mess.

Take the water companies discussion. There's legitimate anger about failing infrastructure, sewage overflow, and executive compensation. The political response? Transform them into not-for-profit cooperatives. Maybe that's the right answer. But notice what happens: you've created a new governance model that will require new regulators, new accountability structures, new reporting standards. You haven't actually fixed a pipe. You've added a committee that will oversee the people who might eventually fix pipes.

The Houthis and shipping fees don't seem connected to English water policy, but they illustrate the same principle. When systems break, our instinct is to layer solutions on top. New fees to protect shipping. New frameworks to manage the new fees. New protocols about the new frameworks. Meanwhile, the underlying problem (whatever it is) remains, now wrapped in bureaucratic kelp.

Devolution conversations feel similar. There's genuine tension between Westminster and regional representation. The answer gets framed as constitutional innovation, more local control, written frameworks. These aren't inherently bad ideas. But they're also not inherently good. They're reshuffling the deck rather than playing with better cards.

Here's what's actually hard: maintaining systems that work.

It's unglamorous. It's not a ribbon-cutting opportunity. You don't get a headline saying "Council Continues to Operate Competently." But this is where competitive advantage, whether in business or governance, actually lives.

The operators who win are the ones who understand that every new layer is a layer that needs managing. Every new committee is a committee that can misalign. Every new framework is a framework that can be gamed or abandoned when political winds shift.

This doesn't mean accepting the status quo. Clearly things are broken. Water companies are failing. Regional governance is awkward. Red Sea shipping is complicated. But the question worth asking before creating a new structure is: would this new structure actually fix the problem, or would it just distribute the problem differently while consuming resources that could go to fixing things?

Some of the most successful organizations operate on the opposite principle from what's happening in British public life right now. They're stripping away layers. Finding what actually matters. Eliminating what doesn't.

The hardest part about this approach is that it requires naming what's actually broken versus what we're just uncomfortable with. Sometimes the problem isn't the structure. Sometimes it's the people running it. Sometimes it's funding. Sometimes it's that we're asking one system to do five different things and wondering why it's broken.

A new governance model doesn't fix that. Neither does a fresh committee.

The operators who thrive will be the ones who look at the current chaos and ask a different question than "what new thing should we build?" Instead: "what could we remove?"

That's the real innovation. Not another layer. Fewer layers that actually work.