Subtract until the real work appears
Most serious work improves when something unnecessary is removed.
When something is not working, my first instinct is still often to add.
Add a meeting.
Add a slide.
Add another step to the process.
Add a tool.
Add more explanation to the sentence nobody understood the first time.
Addition feels responsible because you can point to it.
Look. We did something.
Subtraction is harder.
You have to decide that something which once seemed necessary no longer deserves to exist.
I have started asking a question that annoys me in useful ways:
What could we remove without losing the outcome?
Sometimes half the meeting disappears.
Sometimes the deck does.
Sometimes the process everyone complains about is four approvals protecting against a mistake that happened once three years ago.
Sometimes the paragraph I am most attached to is the reason the piece will not move.
The point is not minimalism for its own sake.
Some things are complicated because reality is complicated.
The goal is not to make everything small.
It is to remove everything that prevents the important thing from being seen.
I notice this especially in work.
A team says it has a prioritization problem.
Then you look closer and find thirty-seven priorities.
That is not a prioritization problem.
It is a refusal to subtract.
A seller says the customer does not understand the value.
The presentation has fifty slides.
Maybe understanding is not the thing that needs to be added.
A leader wants more ownership.
There are seven people who have to approve the decision.
Maybe ownership is already there, buried underneath the system.
Subtraction creates exposure.
Once the extra things are gone, the quality of the remaining decision matters more.
That can be uncomfortable.
There is nowhere for weak thinking to hide.
Which may be why we add so much.
A complicated system distributes responsibility.
A simple one makes it obvious.
I do not think the answer to every problem is less.
But when the real work is hard to find, I know where I look first now.
Underneath everything we added to avoid having to do it.