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.

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.

We also learned what to make harder and slower from works including The Necessity of Friction by Nordal Åkerman, a collection of essays on the virtues of blocking, delaying, and stopping action that draws on fields including economics, organizational theory, physics, and artificial intelligence.