Subtract before adding: doing more isn't a sure recipe for better results
v2.0 - 11/11/2023
Initial Note
This is a living document. I expect it to evolve since "whenever we think we have final answers then progress, science, and better understanding ceases" (The Goal, Eliyahu M. Goldratt).
Addicts of doing more
Our default is to ask what else should we do. When trying to do better, adding is our go-to solution: we add extra features and notifications to convince final customers of acting; we do more analyses and add extra slides to convince stakeholders of our recommendations; we create new meetings, add more team members, and increase budgets to improve performance. We believe doing more leads us to better outcomes and we treat this belief as an axiom. Doing more, however, is far away from being a sure recipe for better results.
Why doing more doesn’t mean better results?
More work doesn't mean increased output
Our output depends on the system’s capacity to transform efforts on throughput. And the system capacity is limited by its bottleneck. If a machine needed to produce goods is already producing at its maximum rate, producing more inputs in previous steps won't mean more throughput, the machine won't be able to process those extra inputs. Similarly, if an engineering team is already coding at its maximum capacity, writing more PRDs for new features won't mean more features launches. Increasing a resource output per unit of time, doesn't mean more productivity. It means more productivity only if those efforts generate more throughput for the whole system (The Goal, Eliyahu M. Goldratt).
Increased output doesn’t mean better outcomes
Getting things out of the door isn’t enough to have better outcomes. The extra work not only should generate extra throughput to be valuable, it must lead to additional consumption. One thing is being efficient, a different one is being effective. The former means don’t wasting resources to get to a finished product -a material good, a new feature, a new marketing campaign, a consulting report-, the later is about producing the right things, those the customer will consume. Then, it is important to understand that consumption can be the bottleneck too. If a customer has limited time to hear your proposal, adding more details to your presentation won't help. If a customer has limited time to test your product, offering more features won’t help. More will not lead to a better result if the customer cannot absorb the extra output.
Time trade-offs are real
Saying yes to any opportunity requires by definition saying no to several others (Essentialism, Greg McKweon). This is an inevitable, inescapable consequence of allocating any finite resource (High Output Management, Andy Grove). Every second we spend adding extra slides to a presentation, is a second we don’t spend talking to our customers, is a second we don’t invest improving our product core value, is a second we don’t use to train our team members, is a second we don’t spend trying to understand better consumption patterns. Like it or not, every time allocation we do comes with a trade-off.
We can expand time by being more efficient, you may argue. The issue, however, is we tend to use the time gained on doing more of the activities we were already doing. We are creatures of habit and keep doing things the way we always have (High Output Management, Andy Grove). Within organizations this is likely to happen since employees have defined roles and particular skills (i.e. they are features owners, account managers, workstream leaders), making it hard to take time savings and using them for tasks different to those we are already doing. Expanding time by being more efficient is feasible, using the extra time in the right tasks is hard.
Not all tasks are created equal
According to the power law theory (or Paretto’s principle), certain efforts produce exponentially more results than others. In other words, not all tasks are created equal. As described, by Shreyas Doshi in his LNO framework, the value we get out from a completed task could be less, the same, or more than the effort we put into it depending on the task nature. Some activities are overhead tasks, tasks that will give us less in return than the effort we put into them. Doing more of these tasks will just deplete our energy. For instance, if we spend more time perfecting a feature the customer won’t use, making beautiful ads pieces for a campaign that won’t air, putting analyses that won’t be presented into slides, or perfectly formatting detailed meeting notes for which only the action points are relevant, we are probably putting more effort in than the value we are getting out of them. Doing more overhead tasks won’t lead us to better results.
Subtracting, the commonly forgotten alternative
Subtracting is asking what should we remove to do better. It is a simple, yet powerful tool. Subtracting, however, is commonly dismissed since it isn't as straightforward as doing more. Subtracting requires investing energy to find those things we shouldn’t be doing and remove them (Subtract, Leidy Klotz). It isn't easy.
Subtracting doesn’t come naturally. It requires wrestling Parkinson’s law -the idea that tasks expand to fill the time allocated to them as gases expand to fill the space they are in-, fighting the urge to use time saved on doing more of the same, and challenging “how we do things around here”. Subtracting requires proactive action.
Subtracting isn’t incentivized. Congratulations, positive feedbacks, and awards are given to those who do new tasks, not to those who stop things. Moreover, we judge those who oppose doing more with negative connotations. We see them as lazy or uncommitted. Furthermore, our language leans towards addition and strengthens misconceptions about subtraction. We give negative connotations to work associated to old staff (e.g. working on tech debt) and we think of maintaining and fixing process and activities, as we do with cars and machines, rather than nurturing, pruning, weeding, and sowing them, as we do in gardening (TBM234: Maintenance, KTLO, and BAU, John Cuttler). The former implies we have fixed assets to take care of; the latter that we have an asset we can grow and improve by removing what doesn’t work. Subtraction depends on creating the right environment for it to flourish — we rarely do so.
So, how can we make subtraction part of our toolkits?
Change the Question
Our default when confronting multiple tasks, activities, or opportunities is to ask ourselves “how can I make it all work?”. This question removes subtraction as an option. We should instead ask ourselves “which problem do I want to solve?” (Essentialism, Greg McKweon). Don’t try to do it all, don’t try to squeeze all the potential to do’s on your list, don’t try to develop all the features, don’t say yes to all the meeting requests you receive, don’t put all the analyses in your slides. Pick your battles.
Have Guiding Principles that Embrace Trade-Offs
One thing is to ask yourself what problem you want to solve, another totally different is being able to answer that question with conviction. Selecting what problem to solve isn’t easy when everything is considered important and urgent. This is specially true when the requests come from different parties (e.g customers, internal teams), each one seeing its own request as the most relevant. Having guiding principles that light your way can facilitate this job. Specifically, having a clear strategy (i.e. what customer you want to serve, what needs you will cover, and at what price), understanding your business loop (i.e. how customer value is transformed into revenue, how revenue is invested into assets, and how assets facilitate processes that create customer value), and/or having some decision making framework (e.g. Gibson Biddle’s DMH framework: only build features that delight the customer, are margin enhancing, and are hard to copy) can be very useful.
A closing note, subtraction is a complex art
Great artists have highlighted subtraction as a key differentiator of great master pieces:
Da Vinci: perfection is reached when there is nothing left to take away,
Michelangelo: sculpting is about seeing the angel in the marble and carving to set him free,
Picasso: art is the elimination of the unnecessary, and
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
I believe that subtraction can make a difference in business and management, but first we need to borrow great artists’ mentality and embrace it.
Interesting comments I have received so far about the post…
Don't forget we have a third option: we can do nothing. Many times it can lead to better results than adding or subtracting. Don't try to optimize and change things that don't need change.