2 Min Read
We’ve all been there—you’re in a meeting and something just isn’t working. A program, a product, a process, maybe even the culture. The natural instinct? Add something. Add resources, people, and steps.

We do it with food too: more salt, more pepper, more milk. But anyone who has over-salted a dish knows the problem—once it’s in, you can’t take it back out😝.

So what if we flipped the question? Instead of asking, “What can we add?” Start with “What can we subtract?”

Maybe the team is too big and slowing things down.

Maybe the product has too many features and is creating friction.

Maybe the play we drew up is just too complicated.

Research shows we often overlook this. Gabrielle S. Adams and colleagues, in a 2021 article in Nature, found that:

When they “…presented ninety-one participants with a pattern and asked them to make it symmetrical by either adding or removing colored blocks. They were intrigued to find that only 20 percent of participants opted to solve the problem by taking blocks away—a subtractive approach.

This bias toward additive solutions is widespread. When presented with a problem, most people naturally think the cause must be that something is missing, rather than that something is gratuitous or out of place.” (Jessica Helfand, The Age of Magical Overthinking, p. 63, referencing Adams et al., 2021)

When you think about it, subtraction can be a competitive advantage. If everyone else is piling on, sometimes the smartest move is to simplify.

The same Nature study also concluded:

“Defaulting to searches for additive changes may be one reason that people struggle to mitigate overburdened schedules, institutional red tape, and damaging effects on the planet.” (Adams et al., 2021)

After all, they say less is more. So next time you’re in that meeting and something isn’t working, try starting with this question:

What can we take away to make this better?

Steve