We’re wired to add, but what happens when we subtract? - Leidy Klotz

0:00When we try to change things from how they are to how we want them to be, why don't we consider this whole class of options, which is like taking away from what's already there. How did you get to that? Playing Legos.

0:17What would happen if we just told the truth? Welcome to TruthWorks, where we dig into the nitty gritty of leadership and work. And what needs to change? I'm Jessica Neal. And I'm Patti McCord. Our journey together started in HR, but trust us, it's evolved into something wild, honest, and well, a bit rebellious. So throw out the handbook. We're here to redefine rules to work for us, not against us. Let's dive into another episode.

0:53Here we go on another episode of TruthWorks. I have my partner in crime for a few episodes, Bob Sutton here helping co-host for me. Patty's still out with some personal stuff, which she's fine, everybody, but she's taking a little break. More exciting, we have a friend of the family, I should say, Bob and Lydie. Colts are good friends, and Lydie is being so gracious to come and talk to us today. And I'm so, so, so excited to talk to you because your work is so interesting, and I've followed it. And I think, you know, a lot of what you're going to talk to us about today is going to be so helpful to our listeners and anybody, not just at work, but in your personal life, I think.

1:46So I'm excited to get into it. I'm going to give you a brief introduction because I want everybody to hear the story from you. but you are a soccer player, athlete, coach, who got into behavioral science. And I don't understand. How did that happen? There was engineering in between there, too. I mean, I think to cut right to the chase of how it happened, I've just always done what I thought was interesting to me. That was the soccer part. And then kind of what I thought was could be helpful to the world to line my skills up with what the needs are. And until I was 22, the main focus in my life was playing soccer.

2:27I played in college and then played professionally for a couple of years. I always knew this was I mean, I I had a dream to be a professional soccer player before there was a professional league in the United States. So I always knew that I was going to have to do something else afterwards. words. And I, you know, I wasn't Lionel Messi. I was, I was making like$2 ,000 a month when I was playing professionally. So it was cool after college, but then when you started to buy groceries and pay the rent and then realize that eventually you're going to have a family and these other things, kind of the writing was on the wall for me.

3:03But it was, I learned a lot of things through soccer and I think, you know, maybe we'll touch on them throughout the episode, but you know, know, you certainly learn teamwork and, you know, what makes people tick and, you know, kind of that there's more going on and what determines the outcome of the game than just simple logic or facts or skills. But, you know, my parents were paying for college, so I was doing an engineering degree at the same time as playing soccer. And once I was done playing soccer, I had that to go back to. I did project management, like construction project management for four years, because that was like the easiest default job to get with a civil engineering degree.

3:42And you didn't have to sit behind a desk, which is something that I thought I didn't want to do. So I learned a lot in that field. And it's a fascinating kind of culture because, I mean, I think it's probably like this in a lot of different cultures, but they're even more so. You've got people who are never even went to college, right? They started as a laborer and they worked their way up and they're the smartest person on the job site. And then you've got these kind of young, you know, book smart people working and trying to contribute. And there's all the kind of, you know, really quickly you figure out it matters who's writing the check, for example.

4:16And this is not something that you learn in engineering school. So, I mean, I started to learn, you know, again, you're seeing the influence of behavior and psychology and sociology on that. And, but then I decided after, um, after four years of doing that, or actually really after like two years of doing that, I was, I'm Kent, you know, summer came along and it's like, I don't have summer break. I can't do this for the rest of my life. And, uh, so that's when I decided to, um, that I might like being a professor. I like the idea of creating and sharing knowledge. And, you know, this is one of the, the great things about this career.

4:55if you work it the right way is that you can be pretty flexible in what you study. And so, you know, like Bob, I'm in engineering, but also like Bob, I kind of, I get to take a broad view of engineering. I think of engineering is like trying to solve problems with science. And I think that, you know, there's a lot of solving problems with behavioral science that could happen. So that's kind of what brought me to where I am now. And then, you know, subtraction, I think, is the most kind of abstract thing that I've looked at. You know, but it's this very fundamental. It comes from this very it's like the most basic applied question.

5:35Right. It's like when we try to change things from how they are to how we want them to be, which is the applied part, that's like application or engineering or any kind of professional work. It's like, why don't we consider this whole class of options, which is like taking away from what's already there? How did you get to that? That's a great question. Playing Legos.

5:59Yeah, so, I mean, I play a lot of Legos with my son Ezra, and he, you know, he was three at the time. If we want a clip of this, I can go get the Legos in a second, but let me go get them. I'll be right back. Okay. We're getting Lego clips. It's great. All right, so we basically have this. Okay. And, you know, my engineering background, this is a bridge. The problem that we have here, as you can see, is that one column is shorter than the other problem. So I turned around behind me to grab a block to add to the shorter column and solve the problem. But before I could do that, my three-year-old had removed a block from the longer column and made the level bridge.

6:43So you can try the experiment on your five-year-old and see what happens. So that's how it started. I'd always been interested in kind of these same ideas that you're talking about, like being overwhelmed at work or elegant building designs or just abstract art or poetry, for example. All these examples where less is more. When I was playing Legos, it kind of really boiled it down to this action that you need to take, right? Which is like when we're trying to change something from how it is to how we want it to be again, and that's the Lego bridge. Why is it that we don't think of taking away, right?

7:21And we've since done a lot of research, which Bob is intimately familiar with. I don't think anybody knows more about our research other than the... Oh, I love it. I'm such a big fan. Other than the four co-authors. Bob is the fifth. He's asking us questions about our research and we have to go back and look at the paper to remember what we did. That's the level of detail. So, Lighty, maybe when I teach this stuff, since I don't go anywhere without my copy of Subtractor, but one of the first things they ask is, so why are we human beings or human organizations? Why is there a natural tendency to add rather than subtract?

8:03Like, have you and Gabe and the rest of the gang thought about that? Oh, yeah. I mean, and that's, like, kind of the fun part of, you know, the research is, like, demonstrating this tendency. And all those, you know, we did a whole bunch of studies to show that we all basically do what I did in that moment with the bridge with Ezra, which cognitively is kind of important to understand. It's that we think first of what we can add, and then we move on without even considering this whole other class of options, right? Right. So it's not that we can't think of subtraction. It's that we're like in our.

8:36Is there a reason for that? Well, I mean, so you can start to look at like biological reasons or cultural reasons and incentive reasons. And they all kind of meld together. I think biologically, the one that is really relevant is this desire to display competence. Right. So the my favorite example of this is the bowerbirds. And so the male bowerbird, you know about this, Jessica? You're shaking your head? No. You don't know about bowerbirds? You should check them out. They're really cool. My dad's a retired biology professor. Okay, so the male bowerbird builds this like fancy ceremonial nest. And depending on the type of bowerbird, they have different designs for their nests.

9:17Some of them look like shotgun shacks. And then they like decorate them with stuff from the world. Like they'll find colorful rocks or they'll find like plastics that humans have thrown into the world. So they create these really nice-looking nests, and then the female bowerbirds go around and look at the nests and decide which male to mate with based on which nest they like. Oh, what nest he made. It all makes sense so far. I should have listened to those type of birds when I was picking my man. You don't like your nest? I love it. Well, so this is what the bowerbirds do, though. Then the female bowerbird, though, doesn't actually use the nest.

9:59They go and build another nest to raise and shelter the young. Well, that makes sense. So the whole point of the first nest is just to show that the bird can move sticks around in the world, right? And, you know, that is kind of a useful signal, right? Because if they can move sticks around in the world, they probably have the genes that will help your offspring find food and so on and so forth. Now, this extends not just to male bowerbirds, but also to female bowerbirds. and extends from Bowerbirds to humans and extends from physical stuff to task completion. It's one of the most robust ideas in psychology.

10:34And I mean, it's Bandura's thing and he's a Stanford guy. And when we check something off our to-do list or when we send an email that, you know, it's 50 % chance of being read, but we want somebody to know that we're actually at work that day. When we show up for a meeting that is marginally useful, when we hold a meeting because we want people to know we're managing our employees. Like part of the reason that we do that, part of the reason it feels good is because of this desire to display competence. And we can show competence. We can be competent by subtracting, right? Sometimes subtracting is the better way to do things as we've seen, but when you subtract, there's not evidence of it.

11:15There's not the nest. There's not the sticks. There's not the, the meeting. And so I think that's a really big reason in the world why this doesn't happen much. And if I look at my own kind of life in the workplace, it's often this desire to display competence that is holding me back from taking away. So that's one reason. Yeah. So I think, you know, if we get to like the company level, right, like a lot of companies almost like do themselves harm, right, because they don't do this and they get into a situation when they're big and bureaucratic and slow. And so, I mean, you just see it everywhere, right?

11:59Like, you know, I'm working with this one company, and it took 60 people to sign off on a contractor. I was like, perfect. I like break out in hives. I like, you know. I break out in hives when I hear that. That's incredible. Right. 6-0? 6-0? Even my lawyer wife would be amazed by that. That's remarkable. A lot. That's a lot. So what can we do about this problem? Yeah. Well, one of my favorite stories is similar to that. So not 60, but there was, it was like a, I was working with a healthcare group and they found out that there were 13 checkpoints for the patient before they got to the doctor.

12:36And so, but instead of reducing the checkpoints, they added like a manager to like take them through the process. Essentially made like a whole nother person. So it was 14. But that's exactly what happens because somebody says, it's so bizarre to me. Somebody says a process is broken, and then they add another layer to the process to fix it. Right? Yeah, Bob. Yeah, no. So this is a really great thing, and something that I'm kind of rebelling is I actually just did an interview last week about maybe every organization should have a role called the chief friction fixer. And I'm like, no, that should be everybody's job.

13:13We don't need another role. But I'm afraid there's some organizations do add them, but I actually think it's everybody's job. I don't think we need a new role. Yeah, I do think that's true. But maybe in the beginning to get everybody thinking like that, there has to be somebody pushing it hard. You know what I mean? I think the CEO is a good person to push it hard. That's true. Yeah, that's better. They should be the first. You know, like when I think back to Netflix, I mean, Reid was very much like that. You know, and he drilled into us that strategy was figuring out what not to do. Like if you want to be strategic, figure out all the stuff you're not going to do.

13:54So it was like, don't add like focus on the one thing, you know? So Lydie, what's some of your favorite examples of situations where people have done subtraction in life? Well, I mean. Or organizations. Like which ones do you love to talk about? Your example of read, Jessica, helps me. Brought one to mind that's one of my favorites. And it's, you know, one of my friends, Melanie Frank, she's a VP at Capital One, but she's really into subtraction. And she's like, one way that I do it is just every time that I go, she works with software teams. So every time she assigns something to one of her software teams, she says, hey, look, I'm asking you to do something that's new, that's hard, that requires your top skill.

14:38What can I take off your plate to help you do this? And it's very similar to, you know, how you described Reed, because, I mean, I think I talk a lot about when I work with groups to getting them to think about building this into their process. And, you know, I had locked into kind of thinking about that as just formal processes. But I think these informal ways, like the way that Melanie is doing it and in asking that every time she's reminding her employees that this is like a valuable thing for the organization. so I think that doing it that way is is really effective I think that's one of my favorite examples I also really like the aggressive ones I think so we talked about this not being able to show competence and you know a lot of these like incremental subtractions just go out of sight and out of mind but if you do really aggressive subtractions like PBS got rid of annual reviews and they still like have a way of giving feedback to their employees but they're like we aren't using these.

15:38They're taking up a whole bunch of time. Now it's just AI generating it and AI reviewing it. And nothing is happening. So why don't we get rid of this? And I think that kind of thing, and of course, some organizations, that's not the right move, but that kind of thing is inspiring to me when people think big about things they can get rid of. I mean, Bob knows well. I mean, I learned about the Asana meeting doomsday from Bob, but again, getting rid of all meeting. Yeah, getting rid of getting rid of meetings. Yeah. So I'll give you my favorite example that I show. Like whenever I do like, in fact, I'm doing something next week for a company, I showed them Lighty's jacket flap.

16:18So can you see this? So this is one of my favorite examples, this book on subtraction. He goes through and crosses out 80 % that looks like of the jacket flap and highlights the best 20%. So, you know, a book doesn't usually have the jacket flap illustrate the point of the whole book. I just think it's just inspired, honestly. Yeah, that's amazing. So that's an example of subtraction that I love. Yeah. So, Bob, because, you know, you've been doing all this work around friction. Uh-huh. But there's, like, correlation between subtraction and friction. Yeah, yeah. We've got a chapter on addition sickness, which starts out by stealing a bunch of work from Lighty and his colleagues.

17:02So, yeah, there definitely is a real... What's the difference? Well, I mean, the way that we would frame it would be that friction is what ought to be harder and what ought to be easier. And adding a whole bunch of things makes things unnecessarily difficult sometimes. So if you had too many people, too many steps in a process, those would be an example of complexity. But one case where friction can be good is to make it difficult to add more stuff. tough so our favorite example from google is that they had too many job interviews they do as many as 25 job interviews before making an offer so i bet you've seen movies like this before jessica so laszlo bach when he was basically head of hr like you he had a funny title but was really head of hr yeah and he made it if you were going to do more than four job interviews you needed written permission from me the head of hr and even just recently like two months ago this is still having long-term effects at reducing the number of interviews at Google.

17:59But that's a case of using good friction to make it harder to add unnecessary stuff. And Leidy knows too many organizations have all these incentives to add, add, add, add, add. That's how you get ahead, add. I just love the example of the birds in the nest. Yeah, me too. I'm going to study these birds now that they've been called to my attention. But Leidy, take us through an organization that you've worked with, like a success story maybe, right? Where, you know, they had a lot and then you helped them lessen. And then what was the outcome? Man, I don't know that I've ever, I, one of the frustrations I think is that I get to drop in and, you know, my job is to kind of shift the mindset and I never get to measure it.

18:47You know, as an engineer and as an academic, that's like, what do you mean? What do you mean I shifted their mindset? What happened? So I think that's hard. I mean, I do get... Or maybe one of the ones that was the most fulfilling for you. Yeah. I guess the fulfilling part is everybody I talk to at least recognizes the problem. That's why I'm there. They're overwhelmed. But there's somewhere around we're overwhelmed. It seems like having less would be good and have no idea of how to do it. And I think that if they can appreciate the fact that this is hard to think of and then more steps to follow through with, subtraction that is, right?

19:31Because it's not that we can't think of it as just not our default way of thinking. And then it's not that we can't do it. It's just that it takes more steps. Then I think they can start to apply the things that Bob just talked about, right? Because if you appreciate, oh, this is harder to do. So what do you do if something is harder to do? Well, you make the other option even harder, right? Or you slow people down so that they're thinking, or you recognize that this is going to take more steps and you actually put that into place. That's a good example of somebody actually doing something. So like I worked with a speaker design company.

20:05It's a cool example because it's really vivid. Most of it, it's like organizational design, but they're designing speakers. And they said that now when they decide to take a component out of their tried and true speaker design, they actually budget more design time for it because they realize that they're going to have to like test how the whole system works and make sure there aren't any unintended consequences of getting rid of that thing. Whereas if you're like adding some new widget to it, you don't necessarily have, you can pretty much trust that it's going to work the same as it did plus the widget.

20:36So I thought that was like a cool example of like, okay, now that they understand the science, now that they understand what's happening here, they can then apply it in their world and make their world tailored to making subtraction more likely to happen. I think the other ones, I mean, just the visibility of it, I think, is really exciting to see. So like, you know, Bob mentioned the subtractor in chief, which I agree completely. It's like, you know, making another role for this is not the solution. It's addition. But to the extent that it makes it visible in the company and signals that this is something our company cares about, I mean, that's kind of useful.

21:11So, you know, whether it's through that or whether it's just like having the person who introduces me say that subtraction is important and this is why it's meaningful to them, you can kind of see the change happening there. So, yeah, those are some examples. And it's so interesting because you talk about, you know, the idea that, you know, people are doing this to be seen as competent, right? But actually, you're more competent when you're subtracting. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But do you think that that's once you get to a certain point in your career, you have that luxury? But I think of the people who are just starting out.

21:50Right. And, you know, they're doing everything to prove that they belong. And it's really hard for them to kind of trust. Oh, no, your boss actually doesn't want to see all the work that you did. Just send them the short email. so it's you know it's different for different people and I think you know as the people who have seen subtraction work we have to kind of give other people the freedom like teach them how to do it yeah yeah what's your advice for younger folks coming up in the workforce I think there's ways to subtract I think it's like you can still show your work right you can still send the short email if you're and like okay this is what I would have sent and then have the attachment with all your work and your boss doesn't need to actually look at it.

22:30I mean, it's kind of like in a presentation, if you, you know, somebody's having you come give a presentation, you don't want it to look like you didn't do anything to prepare. So you can, but you also don't want to like, just come there and talk at them. So you can kind of have materials, supplementary materials that kind of show your work or even the, you know, the flap copy that Bob just showed where it's like, okay, I had these extra words here and I thought of them and then I reduced it down. So you're like kind of showing the steps. That was brilliant, by the way. Yeah. I mean, that was, as Bob knows, that's like the author can suggest things, but the editor has to agree.

23:06And so I give my editor a lot of credit for that one too. And so, I mean, when I think of organizational examples, there are a lot of organizational examples. And even in my university, Stanford University, one of the top three goals of our new president is a simplification movement. And it is interesting that by just getting people focused on, well, what can I subtract? And then having them be able to brag about it. I'm seeing, and we are not perfect, I'm seeing all sorts of examples. I mean, one of my favorite one was that this woman who was like a sort of mid-level administrator, she interviewed everybody who went to their monthly meeting.

23:50This is in humanities and science at Stanford. and after interviewing all of them, 56 people or something like that, they said, well, why don't we meet once a quarter instead but meet in person? So she got rid of – that's eight meetings a year she got rid of. And the way she did it, and the reason that's a good example to me, is that friction fixing or subtraction is actually sometimes a high effort process to get right. But it happens. Another example, which is in our book, is from Netflix, where one of the things that Reed and Patty are very proud of is how easy it is to end your Netflix subscription.

24:28It's so easy. I've done it accidentally before. When I was writing the book, I clicked it, and, oh, my God, I have to. And apparently that was a strategic decision early on. It was. Both because this was described to me by Patty. People were actually embarrassed by how hard it was to get rid of the subscription. And the other thing that Patty emphasized is they got better data. You get Netflix because it was more sensitive because people knew it was easier to quit and easier to come back. So that's a case of reducing steps, basically. So that was what subtraction was like reducing the steps. I love the Stanford example.

25:07That is such a great illustration because she got to meet with all the people individually. right all this work ahead of time and you switched it to in-person meetings fewer in-person meetings so it's a cool illustration of how like subtracting crappy stuff you can add back in the high value stuff yeah yeah and i think like meetings like if people are looking for a place to start meetings is a great place to start like there's so many useless meetings that we just have there is a gentleman on the podcast but he was basically we just follow our calendars we did you know like Nobody questions. Everybody just shows up.

25:41And he's like, if the meeting's 45 minutes, guess how long it's going to take? Yes. 45 minutes. We're 45 minutes. He's like, so if you make it 20 minutes, guess how long it'll take? 20 minutes. 20 minutes, right. Another of Bob's friends, Rebecca Hines, has a book coming. I think it's out now about your best meeting ever. Yeah, it's coming out. Yeah. It's not out yet, but it's done. She put it on LinkedIn, so I'm not spilling the beans, I hope. No, no, no, no, no. you can advance order best meeting ever. Yeah, it's a great title. And she knows more about it than anybody. She's the one behind the meeting doomsday at Asana.