How ‘addition bias’ is holding back your company

Editor’s note: This excerpt from “The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder” (Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao) is published with permission from St. Martin’s Press. 

As the late, great comedian George Carlin put it, “My sh*t is stuff. Your stuff is sh*t.”

That line explains much about why we humans can’t resist adding more and more stuff to our workplaces: staff, space, gizmos, software, meetings, emails, Slack threads, rules, training, the latest management fad. We are wired to see stuff we add as righteous and essential. And to see stuff that others add as annoying and unnecessary.

Such “self-serving biases,” as psychologists call them, make it easy to justify—indeed glorify—creating that new procedure, form, or rule that makes your job easier (and everyone else’s harder), using your favorite app to schedule a meeting (even though no one else uses it), hiring another person for your team (even though it’s too big already), or calling that extra meeting about your pet project (even though no one else cares about it).

To make matters worse, humans default to asking, “What can I add here?” Not “What can I get rid of?” As we touched on in the introduction, 20 studies by Gabrielle Adams and her colleagues show that “addition bias” shapes the solutions that people generate to improve universities, edit their own writing, edit others’ writing, modify vegetable soup recipes, plan trips, and build LEGO creations.

When a university president asked students, faculty, and staff for suggestions about how to improve the university, only 11% entailed subtraction solutions. For one design problem, participants were challenged to modify “a sandwich-like structure made from LEGOs so that it was strong enough and high enough to hold a masonry brick above the head of a storm trooper figurine.” The best solution was to remove a brick. Yet most participants added several bricks—even though they were charged 10 cents for each additional brick.

As Leidy Klotz, the author of the book “Subtract,” says, we are wired to neglect subtraction and use addition as a substitute for thinking.

Natural (but bad) incentives

Organizations accentuate addition sickness by rewarding it with promotions, prestige, and money. And ignoring—or even punishing—people who subtract. Leaders who start big programs are celebrated, not those who disband bad ones.

A study of 137 U.S. public universities by economist Robert E. Martin found that, in 1987, there was a 1-to-1 ratio of administrators to tenure-track faculty. By 2008, there were two administrators for every faculty member. Robert explained, “Those who hold the purse strings have a natural incentive to hire more employees like themselves.” A 2021 study of 117 universities in the United Kingdom by Alison Wolf and Andrew Jenkins found that such administrative bloat keeps getting worse—and growth is especially rampant among the most highly paid managers, professionals, and executives. Recent studies in the United States, Germany, France, and Australia show that their universities suffer from the same disease. Alison Wolf concludes that administrators are added at a higher rate, in part, because there is “far less scrutiny of nonacademic than academic hiring.”

Read our Q&A with Bob Sutton: The power of subtraction in the world of SaaS

All those administrators aren’t just expensive. Like most of us, they feel the need to justify their existence. Many of the organizational changes they understand, value, and implement entail heaping rules, processes, forms, training, and metrics on faculty, fellow administrators, and students.

Strangling good intent

Timothy Devinney, chair of international business at Alliance Manchester Business School, says, as a result, “universities are basically strangling the capabilities of the people within them.” The road to such hell is paved with good intentions—administrators who add friction believe they are improving universities. But the cumulative impact can be stifling—and ridiculous. Timothy described “his horror when he was shown a sprawling spreadsheet of the ‘key performance indicators’ for the university department where he once worked. It included 110 targets, each with staff assigned to monitor them.”

This syndrome reminds us of “The Tragedy of the Commons,” a famous article by economist Garrett Hardin. He uses the analogy of a pasture that is open to all “herdsmen.” Hardin argues that, even after a group of herdsmen have added so many animals that the collective good is declining, each herdsman still has individual incentives for adding more of his own animals:

Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.

Similarly, organizations often provide potent incentives for individuals—including prestige, money, and interesting work—for adding burdens that inflict collective harm. And weak incentives for resisting such temptations. 

That’s the bad news. The good news is that friction fixers can counteract such addition sickness. It starts with activating the subtraction mindset. Gabrielle Adams’ team found that when people paused to think about solutions or were reminded to consider subtraction, they were less prone to default to addition. Venture capitalist Michael Dearing fires up this way of thinking by urging leaders to act as “editor in chief” of their organizations. When Michael was a guest on our “Friction” podcast, he argued that much like skilled text and film editors, the best leaders are relentless about eliminating or repairing things that distract, bore, bewilder, or exhaust people.

‘Good riddance reviews’

You’ve got to decide what to subtract before you remove it. Smart friction fixers do “good riddance reviews” or, as Harvard University’s Cass Sunstein calls them, sludge audits. These are quantitative and qualitative methods that expose the location and levels of destructive friction and resulting damage. We list seven such methods to help you identify subtraction targets. Remember, you are wasting time if you measure all that ugly stuff but don’t use it to guide some subtraction action.

1. Identify “stupid stuff.” Lisa Bodell, CEO of FutureThink, asks, “If you could kill all the rules that frustrate you or slow down your efficiency, what would they be?” A similar spirit propelled the Getting Rid of Stupid Stuff effort at Hawaii Pacific Health. Dr. Melinda Ashton asked healthcare workers to nominate anything in the electronic patient records system that “was poorly designed, unnecessary, or just plain stupid”—which generated 188 subtraction targets.

2. Figure out the value and cost of your meetings. In their Meeting Reset, 60 Asana employees rated each of their standing meetings. They identified more than 500 meetings that were of low value. And don’t forget the time that people spend getting ready for meetings. Bain, the management consulting firm, calculated that one company devoted 300,000 hours a year preparing for a weekly executive team meeting.

3. Measure the burdens imposed by performance measurement. Are you spending so much time evaluating one another that you don’t have time to do your work? Deloitte’s leaders were appalled after they “tallied the number of hours the organization was spending on performance management—and found that completing the forms, holding the meetings, and creating the ratings consumed close to 2 million hours a year.”

4. Catalog sources of email overload. The average employee spends 28% of their time dealing with emails. Is this true at your company (or is it worse)? Review the number, length, recipients, and timing of the emails that people send and receive. What can you subtract? Perhaps an email policy like that used at the consulting firm Vynamic will help. They call it zzzMail, as in catching some z’s: “team members are to refrain from sending emails to other team members between 10pm and 6am Monday through Friday, all day Saturday and Sunday, and all Vynamic holidays. In urgent matters, a call or text is preferred over email.”

5. Observe and interview users. To identify unnecessary and confusing questions in a benefits form completed by more than 2 million Michigan residents each year, Civilla researchers conducted over 250 hours of interviews with residents and civil servants—and observed them as they filled out and explained the form. Civilla identified dozens of obstacles that jeopardized residents’ ability to get benefits.

6. Build a journey map. Diagram the stages that customers or clients travel through as they try to get information, obtain services, or buy products from an organization—and how they, and employees, feel along the way. Our students Elizabeth Woodson and Saul Gurdus used interviews and observations to map the slow and bewildering process imposed on families of disabled children who sought services from the Golden Gate Regional Center, a social services agency in the San Francisco area. They identified numerous bottlenecks that marred clients’ journeys—especially botched handoffs between silos.

7. Try a perfectionism audit. In “The Systems Bible,” John Gall proposed the Perfectionist’s Paradox: In complex systems, “striving for perfection is a serious imperfection.” Pressures for perfection cause needless effort and delay, interfere with learning from imperfect prototypes, and provoke despair. Many things that are worth doing—or are required by others—aren’t worth doing well. Or, as Gall preaches, ought to be done poorly. In that spirit, ask people to identify tasks where the standards are too narrow or too high, or that are enforced with too much zeal. 

Excerpted with permission from St Martin's Press.