The laser pointer is a jittery red dot on slide 118, dancing across a flowchart that looks remarkably like a map of the London Underground if it were designed by someone in the throes of a fever dream. Marcus, the consultant whose suit likely cost more than my first car, is vibrating with the kind of manufactured enthusiasm usually reserved for morning talk show hosts or people trying to sell you a timeshare in a swamp. He is currently explaining the ‘synergistic workflow paradigm’ for a problem that, 48 hours ago, was just two people in accounting not liking each other’s tone on Slack. I am sitting in the back, clicking a pen-the 18th one I’ve tested this morning-trying to find the one that doesn’t skip on the vellum of my notebook.

I am a crossword puzzle constructor. My life is governed by the economy of space and the brutal logic of intersections. If a word doesn’t fit the grid, it doesn’t exist. If a clue is too obtuse, the solver feels cheated, not challenged. But in this boardroom, the grid has been abandoned for a sprawling, 208-page PDF that promises to revolutionize the way we send a simple status report. The air conditioning is humming at a frequency that makes my molars ache, and I realize that we aren’t paying for a solution. We are paying for the theater of effort.

We have been conditioned to believe that if a problem is painful, the remedy must be a multi-layered, subscription-based, AI-powered ecosystem. Marcus isn’t here to tell the head of logistics to go grab a coffee with the head of procurement and apologize for being a jerk. There’s no money in that. There’s no billable hour in ‘just talk to each other.’ Instead, he sells us a $5558-a-month software suite that tracks ‘sentiment metrics’ and ‘inter-departmental touchpoints.’

The Puzzle Analogy

I spent the early part of my morning testing pens because I have a specific mistake I keep making in my drafts. I tend to over-complicate the corner sections of my Sunday puzzles. Last week, I spent 38 hours trying to force a triple-stack of 15-letter words into the northwest corner, only to realize that the resulting ‘crosses’ were so obscure that nobody but a Latin professor with a PhD in 19th-century botany would ever solve them. I was so enamored with my own cleverness-the sheer weight of the construction-that I forgot the point of the puzzle was to provide a moment of clarity for the human on the other side.

We do this in business every single day. We hire consultants to ‘streamline’ operations, and three months later, we have 28 more meetings on our calendars than we did before they arrived. We implement new Project Management Systems that require a dedicated ‘System Administrator’ whose entire job is to remind us to use the system. The solution has become a parasite, feeding on the very time and energy it was supposed to protect. It’s a recurring theme in my work; the more clues I add to ‘help’ the solver, the more I actually just clutter their mental landscape.

“

I would have spent 188 hours defending the Schrödinger square. I would have written a manual on how to perceive both letters simultaneously.

– Constructor’s Cognitive Load

I remember a specific instance where I was working on a grid for a major daily. I had this idea for a ‘Schrödinger’s Clue’-a square that could be two different letters depending on the cross. It was brilliant. It was expensive in terms of my own cognitive load. It was, in short, a disaster. When I finally stripped it back and just used a simple, elegant four-letter word that everyone knew, the puzzle sang. But if I were a consultant charging by the hour, I would have spent 188 hours defending the Schrödinger square. I would have written a manual on how to perceive both letters simultaneously.

This addiction to the ‘Expensive Solution’ is driven by a profound, unacknowledged fear. If we admit that our problems are simple-that they are rooted in lack of trust, poor communication, or a refusal to make a hard decision-then we have to take responsibility for them. If the problem is ‘we need a new $10008 software integration,’ then the problem belongs to the IT department or the vendor. We can hide behind the implementation phase for 88 weeks. We can blame the ‘learning curve.’ We can point to the 128-page ‘Implementation Roadmap’ and say, ‘Look how hard we are working!’

It is the corporate equivalent of my 18 pens. I don’t need 18 pens. I need one that works. But if I admit that I only need one, then I have to face the blank page and actually start construction. Testing the pens is a way of avoiding the work of the puzzle. Buying the complex software is a way of avoiding the work of the business.

When you’re staring at a stack of 108 forms for a process that should be a single click, you start to value something like visament because it refuses to participate in the theater of the difficult. There is a quiet dignity in a tool that does exactly what it says on the tin without demanding you attend a three-day retreat in Scottsdale to learn how to open it.

I watched Marcus click through to slide 148. He’s talking about ‘cascading accountability matrices.’ My mind drifts back to my desk. One of the pens I tested earlier, a cheap plastic ballpoint that probably cost $0.88, was the only one that didn’t smudge. It felt honest. It didn’t have a ‘ergonomic grip’ or ‘archival-grade pigment,’ but it left a clear, dark line on the paper. It allowed me to see the grid for what it was.

The Soulless Machine

I once knew a constructor who tried to automate her clue-writing process using a custom-built database. She spent 288 days tagging every word in the English language with ’emotional resonance scores’ and ‘historical frequency indices.’ She thought she was building a machine that would make her the most prolific creator in the industry. Instead, she lost the ‘click.’ Her puzzles became technically perfect but entirely soulless. They were solutions to a problem that didn’t exist-the ‘problem’ of the human touch being inefficient.

Efficiency is the siren song of the consultant. They promise it like a holy grail, but their version of efficiency always seems to come with more overhead. If you have to hire 8 people to manage the efficiency, you haven’t actually gained anything; you’ve just shifted the burden and added a layer of insulation between yourself and the results.

I look at the people in this boardroom. They are tired. You can see it in the way they are slumped over their 8-dollar coffees. They don’t want a paradigm shift. They don’t want a synergistic workflow. They want to go home feeling like they accomplished something instead of just having survived another day of navigating the systems we built to ‘help’ them. They are trapped in a grid of someone else’s making, where none of the clues make sense and the ‘black squares’ are moving.

The Value of Directness

I finally found the pen. It’s a simple felt-tip, black ink, no frills. I write one word in the margin of my notebook: Enough.

We need to stop equating price tags with efficacy. We need to stop believing that a 128-slide deck is a sign of expertise. True expertise is the ability to take a chaotic mess of human needs and distilled it down to a single, actionable point. It’s the ability to see the 15-letter word that anchors the entire grid and makes everything else fall into place.

As Marcus wraps up his presentation-only 8 minutes over time, a miracle-he asks if there are any questions. The room is silent. Not because we understand, but because we are too exhausted by the ‘solution’ to even remember what the problem was. We are already anticipating the 48 follow-up emails that this meeting will generate. We are already dreading the training sessions for the software that will inevitably break in 28 days.

I pack up my 18 pens and my notebook. I’m going back to my studio to erase that over-complicated corner of my puzzle. I’m going to throw out the clues that require a manual to understand. I’m going to find the simplest, most direct way to get from 1-Across to 72-Down. Because at the end of the day, the only solution that matters is the one that lets you finish the game and move on to something else.