➔ Leadership in practice

In 2021, Leidy Klotz, an engineer at the University of Virginia studying how people solve problems, gave participants a Lego structure and a simple brief. The roof was wobbly. Fix it however you like.

They began adding bricks, creating towers to prop up the structure. When Klotz told participants that adding bricks would cost them money, most still reached for more pieces. But no matter how many they added, the roof remained wobbly.

It was only when he said explicitly, "You can also remove bricks,"  that the majority even considered it.

The solution, it turned out, had been there the whole time. It didn’t need more bricks. It simply needed one single brick taking away. Remove it, and the whole thing is balanced.

Klotz has since run the same test on essays, travel itineraries, city plans, and business strategies. The result is remarkably consistent. Given a problem, humans add. We almost never subtract. Addition feels like progress. It looks like work. Removal looks like giving up.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, his first move wasn't a new product. He cancelled 70% of what they were making. When Coco Chanel was asked about her design philosophy, she said, “Before you leave the house, remove one thing.”

For creative leaders, the additive bias has a specific cost. It shows up in briefs that keep growing, decks that never shrink, processes that accumulate meetings like barnacles on a hull. Nobody decides to make things complicated. It just happens, one addition at a time, until the structure is too heavy to move.

The thread running through this week’s newsletter is Subtraction.

Go deeper:

Notes:

#1 The experiment was inspired by Klotz's own four-year-old son Ezra, who spontaneously removed a brick to fix a wobbly bridge rather than adding one. Klotz had shown the same problem to adult colleagues, professors and students. Every single one of them added.

#2 In another study, in which people were asked to improve a recipe that included a slice of chocolate in a grilled cheese sandwich, most people added ingredients to balance it. Almost nobody just took the chocolate out.

#3 For decades, the instinct was to add training wheels to children’s bikes, but the big breakthrough came when the pedals were removed entirely. Children who learn on balance bikes have fewer falls and learn faster.

➔ Systems and frameworks for thinking

Childhood ear infections are the single biggest reason antibiotics are prescribed to children. In the US alone, they account for over 100 million antibiotic days every year. Yet in most of those cases, the guidelines recommend not prescribing at all.

The outcomes, it turns out, are statistically comparable. Do nothing, watch and wait, and most children recover just as well. The medical term for this deliberate inaction is “watchful waiting.” Despite the results being so similar, fewer than 5% of cases are managed that way. The theory is that doctors prescribe anyway because action feels like care and inaction feels like negligence. The prescription is visible proof that something is being done.

Nassim Taleb has a name for the discipline those doctors are failing to exercise. He calls it Via Negativa, a theological term in which God is understood not by what God is but by what God isn't. Taleb applied it everywhere. The principle is always the same: we know what is wrong with more certainty than we know what is right. Progress, more often than we admit, grows through subtraction. As Saint-Exupéry put it: "Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

For creative leaders, the overprescription problem is everywhere. The meeting that exists because cancelling it feels like abandoning something. The strategic priority still on the list because removing it feels like failure. Via Negativa is a simple mental model worth adding to your workflow. Stop asking your team what they need more of. Start asking what you should stop doing entirely. Not deprioritise. Not revisit. Stop.

Notes:

#1 Studies show that doctors prescribe antibiotics partly because they believe parents expect them, but when researchers actually asked parents, half of them would have been happy with watchful waiting and pain management instead.

#2 Warren Buffett's primary investment rule is not "find great companies." It is "don't lose money." His entire framework is built around identifying and eliminating what he won't do — sectors he doesn't understand, businesses with poor economics, managers he doesn't trust.

#3 Studies of chess grandmasters show that at the highest levels, the decisive factor is rarely a brilliant attacking move — it's the consistent avoidance of errors. Excellence is what remains after you've removed the mistakes.

➔ Lifting the lid on what’s happening inside our brains when we do creative work

Stephanie Preston has spent her career trying to understand why people can't let go. A behavioural neuroscientist at the University of Michigan, Preston studies the psychology of acquisition. She wants to understand why we gather things, why we struggle to release them, and what that reveals about the brain systems driving both. Her work sits at the intersection of hoarding, decision-making, and evolutionary biology.

In one experiment, she shows participants a series of virtual ordinary objects on a screen. A banana. A coffee mug. A used sticky note. Each time one appears, the participants are asked: "Do you want this?” No cost, no consequence, nothing actually arrives. Most people still take almost everything.

By the end, they've accumulated sixty or seventy virtual objects they'll never own and don't need. Then Preston asks them to reduce the pile. First to a shopping cart, then a single grocery bag. Many people struggled to remove enough to fit the cart, then the bag.

When you acquire something, even something imaginary, your brain's Ventral Striatum fires. A small dopamine reward quietly registers it as progress. But when you consider giving something up, the amygdala takes over. That's the threat system. Gain feels like reward. Loss feels like danger.

Economists have a name for both ends of this. The Endowment Effect: we overvalue things simply because we own them. Loss Aversion: losing something hurts roughly twice as much as gaining the same thing feels good.

The brain systems that are responsible for Loss Aversion are the same systems responsible for the meetings you can’t take out of your diary and the slides you can’t cut from your deck. Preston's experiment revealed the default setting. And defaults, unless you actively change them, tend to stick. So the question is, what would it take to make subtraction feel as rewarding as adding?

Go deeper:

Notes:

#1 Daniel Kahneman gave students a coffee mug and immediately offered to buy it back. People wanted roughly twice as much to sell the mug as they'd have been willing to pay for it minutes earlier. Ownership changed the value.

#2 Across eight experiments, people consistently overlooked subtractive changes unless they were explicitly reminded, “you can also take things away,” and even then, addition still dominated their ideas.

#3 In Powers’ study, many participants fail to shrink their virtual hoard enough to fit in a single grocery bag, even with feedback telling them they haven’t removed enough yet.

🔗 Quick links to more stories 📖

Uncertainty is not the enemy - I really enjoyed this conversation between Brene Brown and Adam Grant on dealing with uncertainty, particularly the question on whether Premortems are about spotting risk or building psychological safety within a team. (70 min listen)

Why rest alone doesn’t restore energy - “You might be lying down or taking a break, but you’re still thinking, worrying, and checking your phone. It might look like rest from the outside, but it’s not restorative because the engine is still running.” (5 min read)

The Duolingo taxi test costs a candidate a job - To assess candidates for a senior position, hiring managers routinely ask taxi drivers booked to bring candidates to the interview how they were treated on the journey. I spent 15 years at BBC Radio 1 and rated pop stars on how well they treated Clare on reception. McCartney scored high. Others, not so. (3 min read)

Strong and Wrong - The always interesting Dan Taylor-Watt shares why you should argue with your chatbot of choice. Dan’s newsletter is a brilliant resource for keeping on top of how chatbots are evolving. He frequently runs comparison tests, which can bring clarity in an occasionally overwhelming space. (3 min read)

Eight ways to say no with grace and style - Still on the subject of doing less, these are very useful if you find pushing back difficult (list)

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