Subtraction
Why our obsession with addition leaves us with less
Burn the sun
Burn the light
Take, take, take, take, take, take it away
- Take It Away, The Used
As part of a “How to Make a Business Case” class that I created for our Customer Care leadership team, I presented the team with the following challenge:
Imagine you are a manager at this Circle K location and have been tapped to address the escalating number of robberies occurring. Like most convenience stores, the cash on hand makes your store a target for petty criminals, and the crime rate is hurting your employees, customers, and bottom line. Also, like most convenience stores, margins are thin, so you don’t have unlimited capital to solve the issue.
What do you do?
If you’d like to play along at home, take a minute to consider what you would do. I’ll wait.
…
If you’re like most of the participants in the class, your ideas likely fall into three buckets:
Costly deterrents (e.g., higher security monitoring, hiring on-site security, etc.),
Cheap but unreliable preventative controls (e.g., employees keep a firearm under the register, ask local police to stop by more often, etc.), or
Acknowledgment that robberies happen and focus on the aftermath (e.g., training employees on how to handle the situation, higher-definition cameras to catch perpetrators, etc.).
There’s nothing inherently wrong with these ideas, but none of them feel quite right. You may have noticed a theme to the buckets - they all add something. Added security. Added police presence. Added training. We’re operating in a constrained environment (again, margins are thin), yet we can’t help but invest in adding something to remove the problem. What we so often overlook is removing something from the equation.
Take a look at that picture of the storefront again. Did you notice that all of the windows are obscured by advertisements? Gee, I wonder why criminals see your store as an easy target.
This may sound like a silly example, but it’s based on a program launched by the police in Canada called Clear Zone. The basic premise is simple - providing visibility directly into a store and the front counter from the street deters criminals because they know it's more likely they'll get caught. Launched in 2013, it reduced robberies by 18%…and, most importantly, it cost the stores virtually nothing.
Our default mode to add is not exclusive to convenience store owners. Behavioral scientist Leidy Klotz designed a series of experiments with lego structures to showcase how we often overlook removing something to improve it (emphasis added by me).
In one study, recently published in Nature, we challenged participants to modify a sandwich-like structure made from Legos so that it was strong enough and high enough to hold a masonry brick above the head of a stormtrooper figurine. Each participant received a structure consisting of parallel horizontal Lego panels connected by a vertical column that narrowed to only one block wide where it connected to the top panel. We asked participants to:
“Improve this project so that it can hold a brick above the storm trooper’s head without collapsing.”
And we offered an incentive:
“You will earn one dollar if you successfully complete this task. Each piece you add costs ten cents.”
The best solution is to remove the single block forming the thin part of the column. The top panel can then be attached to the larger section of the column, which stabilizes the structure and still leaves enough clearance to avoid the storm trooper getting squashed by the masonry brick.
Subtracting one block was the fastest way to solve the problem. Plus, only subtracting allowed participants to earn the full dollar.
And yet participants were still more likely to add than subtract. This was evidence that people add to their detriment—at least when trying to modify a Lego structure so that it can hold a brick safely above the head of a stormtrooper.
The full paper is fascinating, but you get the point. Only when prompted to think about subtraction, did anyone consider removing a brick to stabilize the structure. Otherwise, people focused on adding bricks despite the cost.
If you reflect on your own experience, you’ve likely seen this a lot. When the workload increases, we look to hire rather than remove tasks and meetings that no longer make sense. When employees miss deadlines, we invest more time in checkpoints rather than looking for ways to make the work simpler to complete. When salespeople have trouble selling the product, we invest in more training about the feature set rather than removing pieces from the sales pitch.
In most cases, these efforts are not only allowed but celebrated. As discussed in They’re Only Chasing Safety, doing more is a good cover for when nothing is going well. Sure, times are tough, but look at their effort…or so the thinking goes. Ultimately, these strategies delay the inevitable, but that doesn’t negate the attractiveness of the tactic.
The key to all of this is to remember that subtraction isn’t about having less but removing the pieces that leave you with less. Paradoxically, only by removing things that would otherwise diffuse our efforts can we ultimately end up with more. Said another way, when things aren’t adding up, start subtracting.