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In a recent New York Times opinion piece, climber Francis Sanzaro explains how his failure at a difficult ascent was caused by his aspiration to get to the top. As soon as he gave up his desire to succeed at the climb — and the pressure, anticipation and performance anxiety that his desire engendered — he was able to joyfully scramble up the cliff face.
“I discovered the power of subtraction,” he concluded.
While Sonzaro is talking about subtraction in a sporting endeavor, the idea resonates in many parts of life, including the workplace.
Many employees feel the need to take things away from their workload: meetings, mindless tasks, red tape, to name just a few. But it is difficult to reduce the amount we need to do each day because we spend very little time thinking about the benefits — and the power, as Sanzaro posits — of subtracting.
Here are some tips.
Strengthening Our Subtraction Muscles
“Subtracting is a muscle we aren’t taught to develop,” said Matthew May, coauthor of “What a Unicorn Knows: How Leading Entrepreneurs Use Lean Principles to Drive Sustainable Growth” and senior advisor at global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners.
Research published in Nature illustrates humans’ propensity to add instead of take away. Test subjects asked to complete various tasks consistently defaulted to adding, even when subtracting would produce a more efficient solution to a problem.
“We found that people sure do like to add,” said Dr. Andrew Hales, one of the study’s authors and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Mississippi. “That's not necessarily bad, except that there are a lot of situations where potentially subtracting could be advantageous. And the tragedy might be that you don't even consider those options in the first place.”
4 Ways Organizations Can Subtract — and Benefit From Less
Organizations can find many ways in which subtracting will help them increase efficiency and productivity, make their people happier and reap the associated rewards.
It’s easy to see, for instance, the potential benefits of fewer meetings, less paperwork, more streamlined workflows and leaner operations. But it’s not as easy to actually reduce the amount your people are doing.
Here are four strategies experts on subtraction in the workplace recommend:
1. Get Rid of Sludge
Most workers are familiar with what Hales refers to as “sludge,” these friction-laden bureaucratic processes like time-consuming paperwork and slow approval processes.
“Often, these [processes] were created incrementally, and each increment made sense,” he said. “If we add this form, we'll get this benefit; if we add this process, we'll have this safeguard. But the end result is something that is difficult to manage and might not make as much sense as each of the individual components.”
Managers looking to reduce sludge should assess each point of friction to delete as many as possible.
2. Make Subtraction Visible
One reason most of us tend to add instead of subtract in the workplace is that no one can see what we don’t do, even if avoiding unnecessary work takes a lot of effort.
“No matter what it is that you take away, whether it’s something physical or an activity or an idea, it’s out of sight and out of mind,” said Dr. Leidy Klotz, a coauthor of the Nature study, a professor in the engineering department at the University of Virginia and the author of “Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less.” “Whomever did the work to get rid of that thing, it’s hard to get credit for it.”
To solve for this reality, Klotz recommends that managers acknowledge and even celebrate subtractions in annual reviews or at every meeting with their team.
3. Use Subtraction Rules and Games
Making the work of subtracting concrete can be helpful.
Both Klotz and Robert Sutton, an organizational psychologist at Stanford University and the author of the forthcoming book “The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder,” propose subtraction rules such as the rule of halves: Try to either halve the number, length and invitees of meetings or the frequency, length and number of people copied on emails.
Sutton also suggests a subtraction game: Have employees list the things that they wish were removed and then pick the easiest and most challenging targets. For example, an HR manager might find it easy to reduce the frequency of a weekly staff meeting but challenging to consolidate 10 disparate and overlapping parental leave policies into a single benefit.
The exercise is intended to make people realize that subtracting is a valid activity and can benefit all teams and employees in an organization. “What you’re doing is you’re provoking the subtraction mindset,” said Sutton.
4. Assign a 'Subtractor in Chief'
Establishing subtraction as a valued and visible approach to transforming processes and workflows may take some serious oversight and encouragement. This is why some organizations find benefit from assigning a rotating “subtractor in chief” on each team or dedicating a permanent one for the company.
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The role of the subtractor in chief is to encourage subtraction or, even better, discourage employees from adding in the first place.
In a Harvard Business Review article, Sutton and his team identify how a subtractor in chief can mitigate the problem of proliferating tech that occurs when managers are given credit cards with little oversight. Requiring that each software purchase be approved by someone like the CTO adds a step to the software procurement process but results in huge benefits by subtracting complication, redundancy and cost within the company’s tech stack.
“There needs to be some sort of authority unless you have a really fantastic culture,” said Sutton.
Related Article: Think Like a Designer: How an Experience Design Mindset Benefits the Employee Experience
The Learning Curve to Subtraction
The value of subtraction is a helpful but elusive idea; one that most of us underappreciate and struggle to enact, even when motivated. Using the strategies above can help organizations integrate the concept into their workflows and management approaches. But in doing so they should always keep in mind that subtraction is more difficult than it sounds.
“Subtraction isn’t necessarily easy,” said Hales. “One of the insights of our work is that it actually takes more time invested in a problem to notice the things you can take away. Appreciating that is valuable in the workplace.”
Klotz agrees. “Our research shows that subtraction takes more mental effort,” he said. “But having a clear vision of what you want to achieve can help you see what can be subtracted.”
