Subtraction Tools

Means for Spotting and Removing Destructive Organizational Friction

• Simple subtraction rules. Building on Don Sull and Kathy Eisenhardt’s Simple Rules, these are simple shortcuts and crisp constraints that help people focus their attention on what ought to be removed from their organizations.

• Subtraction rituals. These are scripted actions that people take to mark routine or rare changes when they remove or lose people, places, and practices that have been part of their work lives. These choreographed packages of words and deeds can be simple or elaborate, are imbued with meaning for the people who practice them, and can provide comfort, guidance, and stronger social bonds.

• Subtraction specialists. People or teams charged with keeping life as simple, easy, delightful, and cheap as possible in the organization and have the authority, skill, time, and money to subtract (or add) as they fit.

• Subtraction games. Exercises in which people begin with solo brainstorming about organizational obstacles that slow their work and drive them crazy. Then they meet to share “subtraction targets,” select one or a few to remove, and outline implementation plans. Subtraction games can be as short as thirty minutes or extend for months when people are determined to remove destructive friction.

• Meeting repair and removal tools. These are methods to help people identify and eliminate bad meetings. For meetings that remain, these methods help people make them shorter and less frequent, with fewer attendees, and give people permission to decline invitations and leave meetings that are a poor use of their time.

• Purges. Deep, focused, rapid, and sometimes downright authoritarian efforts to remove an organization’s broken parts.

• Subtraction movements. These are enduring, participative, and multipronged efforts to spread the subtraction mindset throughout an organization, to teach people and reward them for making systemwide and local changes that, taken together, eliminate unnecessary burdens inflicted on employees, customers, partners, and community members.

P.S. Celebrate people who don’t add unnecessary stuff in the first place. Don’t forget those precious people who abhor and resist adding needless stuff, which averts the need for subtraction.

To help people apply this lesson, we’ve run the Subtraction Game with at least a hundred organizations, including: the top eight executives at Bloom Energy;100 credit union executives; 150 Netflix film postproduction employees; 300 partners in a big law firm; 400 Microsoft executives; and 60 Stanford staffers at a “Help Center” workshop. We ask people to start with solo brainstorming, to “think about how your organization operates. What adds needless frustration? What scatters your attention? What was once useful, but is now in the way?” For some organizations, we add, “Identify impediments that are within your sphere of influence and that are systemic at your company.” Next, people meet in small groups or online rooms for ten minutes or so, discuss the impediments each member generated, and brainstorm more potential subtraction targets. Then, to focus their attention, they select a couple of targets and outline rough implementation plans—who would lead the charge to eliminate these obstacles, whose support they would need along the way, and which people and teams might push back against the change.

Some organizations fight back with strategic subtraction. Like the monthlong Meeting Doomsday pilot program that Rebecca Hinds at Asana ran with that small group of marketing employees. As we explained above under “Good Riddance Reviews,” the first stage was a meeting audit, where employees studied their calendars and identified recurring meetings that lacked value. The second stage was the Meeting Doomsday part, in which employees removed all of the standing meetings with less than five people from their calendars for forty-eight hours. Then, as Rebecca put it, after people lived “with their newly cleansed calendars” for a couple days, they repopulated them “only with those meetings that are valuable—according to their own meeting audit.” Employees eliminated some meetings, reduced the frequency of others, and made many shorter—cutting thirty-minute meetings to fifteen minutes, and sixty-minute meetings to forty-five minutes. Meeting Doomsday packed a wallop. Rebecca reports participants saved an average of eleven hours per month. One Asana employee, Francesca, in the marketing group, believed her calendar was already in “top shape” before participating in the pilot. But she turned out to be the Doomsday “all-star,” saving thirty-two hours a month.

When we started this friction adventure, we believed that nearly everything in organizational life ought to be as quick and easy as possible. We were wrong. We now believe that subtraction is beautiful because it clears our minds and gives us time to focus on what ought to be hard, inefficient, complex, and frustrating. Subtracting unnecessary distractions and burdens creates time to develop the deep relationships that are essential for doing great work—and living a fulfilling life.

Appendix

“We wrote a friction article for Gallup.com, “Too Many Teams, Too Many Bosses,” and for Times Higher Education, “Our To-Do Lists Can’t Grow Forever. It’s Time to Try Subtraction.