“Everything Must Go”: The Risk of Throwing It All Away

By: Jessica Mensah   |   June 5, 2025   |   3 min read

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the kind of political and cultural moment we’re in. There’s something about the tone of it all that feels familiar, but more extreme. It’s like we’ve stopped trying to fix things and instead have decided to toss everything out, just to make a point. We’re living in a “throw the baby out with the bathwater” era.

Oversimplification feels efficient. It’s our brain’s shortcut, but it can be dangerous. In politics and leadership, it leads to wide-scale rejection of entire systems without thought for what’s still working. At Northwestern, I studied Oversimplification Bias, the tendency to reduce complex problems into overly simplistic forms. While it saves mental energy, it often causes real-world damage.

That’s where tripwires come in. Borrowed from Chip and Dan Heath’s book Decisive, tripwires help us pause before we act on autopilot. These intentional safeguards create space for clarity.

Practical tripwires might include pausing before making fast decisions, seeking a second opinion, or asking: “What am I missing?” or “What else could be true?” In leadership and in policy, that extra moment of discernment matters.

Imagine assuming your employee is lazy because they miss a deadline until you pause, check in, and learn they’re caring for a loved one. That shift in approach can change everything.

In the national landscape, we’re seeing policies dismantled without refinement, whole structures torn down without examining what was working. From DEI and immigration to education and FEMA, broad strokes are replacing thoughtful adjustments. It’s not reform it’s rejection.

And what we risk, in our haste to clean house, is losing the tools and systems that were serving people well.

I hope that we learn how to distinguish between the harmful and the helpful. That we pause. That we hold onto the baby, even if the bathwater needs changing.