Abstract
Subtraction neglect is a real problem in our lives and organizations. Additive change, increasing the number of activities, tasks, and goals, is the unrelenting norm. Subtractive change removes things. For people and organizations starved from bandwidth, and change scholars and practitioners seeking new capabilities, subtractive change offers opportunity to make organizational change both kinder to people and more effective. I offer a few ideas for promoting subtractive change in scholarship and practice: the difference between Virtuous Subtraction realizing value and Exploitative Subtraction deflecting burdens on to others; the essential roles of reflective practice, awareness of organizational history, and mindful attention to stakeholders in Virtuous Subtraction; and Anticipatory Subtraction where practices are time-marked with start and/or stop dates to call attention to opportunities for review and updating; and legacy-building practices to respect the value served by subtracted practices.
Marie Kondo (2014), the tidying expert, advocates giving things away if they don't spark joy. Reducing clutter in our homes can be a means to achieve harmony and focus. But what about clutter in our organizations? I am not so much thinking about material clutter, like the files collecting dust on top of an office cabinet, but rather the habits, practices, and rules that no longer spark joy or add value. We tend to overlook the value of subtractive change, where a planned organizational change deliberately removes something. Think about ending a dress code, eliminating sign offs on expense reports, or dropping a line of business.
I am writing this essay in the era of coronavirus-2019 , a time of subtraction if ever there was one. Its shutdowns and disruptions to our way of life and work have led to a few awakenings. Carbon emissions dipped in many places, streets empty of traffic were taken over by skateboarders, and bosses who once refused flexible work requests had entire teams working from home. Things we once thought would always be there went away and for the most part we adjusted. Subtractive change means the transformed state has fewer components than the original state. It is a valuable concept and important tool in human well-being and organizational change. Since Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden, subtractive change has been with us—though not particularly popular and rarely attended to constructively. In this essay, building on insights from basic research (Adams et al., 2021; Klotz, 2021), I advocate that the scholars and change managers who constitute the core audience of the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science drill down into understanding and implementing virtuous forms of subtractive change. In the words of Adams and her colleagues (p.258), “Defaulting to searches for additive changes may be one reason that people struggle to mitigate overburdened schedules, institutional red tape and damaging effects on the planet.”
The Cognitive Challenge of Subtractive Change
People find it easier to add rather than subtract things. Cognitively, we default to additive change, blind to the possibilities of subtractive change (Klotz, 2021), as demonstrated in a clever series of experiments (Adams et al., 2021). Adams and her colleagues studied how people approach change in an object, idea, or situation. They found that blindness to subtractive possibilities starts in the idea-generation phase, for which they offer several explanations. Additive changes may be easier to think about because we need to really understand the object to be changed to subtract something from it. Then, there is the human preference for higher, bigger, and more, all promoted by addition. Think of the last time a CEO was hailed for shrinking a business. We also hesitate to subtract since it more readily disrupts the status quo while addition maintains it. Taking these explanations together suggests it just may be easier to find ways to add rather than to subtract.
It's no surprise to organizational change scholars that fundamental challenges in change often stem from the way we think. As humans we overreact to losses (Tversky & Kahneman, 1991), per the adage “losses are more painful than gains are good.” In complex organizational change, losses typically are experienced before gains from a change are realized. Our sensitivity to losses means that it takes many more visible benefits to create positive feelings about change (O’Brien & Klein, 2017).
The upshot is that we can be blind to, and often downplay, opportunities where subtraction is beneficial. As Newell and Simon (1972) pointed out, all change requires a mental search for possible changes. People consider only a limited number of possible solutions to reduce the cognitive burden of problem solving. For this reason, our solutions tend to be adequate but not necessarily optimal since superior solutions are not pursued. The lack of optimality in our largely additive change practices leads to my next concern, the burdens imposed on individuals and organizations by the relentless pursuit of additive change.
Unmitigated Additive Change
Change interventions typically add something that was not there before: new training or tasks, additional incentives or expanded goals and objectives. A common problem in project management is scope creep where a project's requirements increase over its lifecycle. Businesses and military campaigns too suffer from mission creep: required activities and objectives grow often without commensurate increases in resources.
Human bandwidth is finite, the energy and attention needed to deal with a situation can exceed capacity. As the number of goals pursued increases, the quality of both individual and organizational performance tends to decline (Shetty, 1979). Something else odd happens too. An organization's leaders can set a dozen goals (or more), but its members who could have managed to attain three or four goals do not pay attention to the whole dozen. Confronted with a long list of “deliverables,” members instead focus on a prominent few, often those readily attained. However, the really odd thing is this: By virtue of too long a list of now unattainable goals, organization members lose faith in their leaders and behave defensively with one another, stressing out over the gap between aspirations and reality.
Performance quality erodes when our pursuit of addition disregards capacity and bandwidth. Marzano (2003) provides a telling example from American schools, where U.S. mathematics textbooks address almost twice as many topics as do German textbooks and almost 3.5 times as many topics as Japanese textbooks--and science textbooks are even more extreme. Yet German and Japanese students outperform American students in math and science. Adding material does not translate to learning it better and may even undercut mastery and retention.
Unmitigated additive change erodes quality of work life for workers too. Additive change on top of already limited bandwidth has perverse outcomes. We know that people tend to be loss averse, sensitive to departures from a current status quo. Attentive to preserving what they have, desperation can set in when resources are stretched or exhausted, leading to maladaptive behavior (Hobfoll et al., 2018; Lim et al., 2020) from mistakes and cover-ups to security breaches. So what to do when enough is not enough?
Paying More Attention to Subtractive Change
My interest in subtractive change began years ago when a participant in an executive program told me about an incident we could call: Forgot to report? No problem--Forgot to notice. The command at an Air Force base regularly filed a report each month with headquarters. One busy month, the executive officer forgot to file it. Another month passed before he realized it, and no one from headquarters had inquired about the overdue report. Eighteen months later, the officer still hadn't filed that once-monthly report. Its filing is no longer part of the duties that office performs—voila subtractive change!
What then might be the consequences of subtraction? On the positive side, subtraction can conserve or free up resources and protect human and organizational bandwidth, preserving opportunities for something better later. The 80/20 rule asserts that focusing time and effort on 20% of activities shapes 80% of results (Koch, 2011). Applying this rule of thumb can entail delegating or eliminating things that don't move a program forward. The positive side of subtraction conserves resources and avoids wasted effort by removing organizational clutter, components accumulated over time that are no longer beneficial. Organizational clutter comes in two forms, superfluous technical elements like tasks and activities whose usefulness has declined and ancillary values out of sync with the organization's primary goals. Subtractive change in organizations is often technically efficient, like dropping rules or requirements no longer useful. Subtraction can also better realize a fundamental value. Alcoa chief executive officer Paul O’Neill instituted an honor system for travel reimbursement, dropping the requirement that every expense report needed a manager's signoff, randomly auditing a few instead. Subtraction can be transformative if it creates new meanings, better focuses attention on things that matter or resolves ambiguity. An everyday example for academics is the subtractive change of editing a paper—cutting out both technical and value clutter. We remove technical clutter when we cut unnecessary words. We remove value clutter when we delete an entire section that distracts from the paper's theme.
On the negative side, subtraction can be disruptive, disturbing the people and relationships attached to subtracted activities, depriving them of status or other resources. Subtractive change can create value threat not just technical loss, as when a program we are particularly vested in gets dropped. Recent attention to subtraction in change management and JABS has focused on matters of loss (Hakak, 2015). Losses accrue from both additive and subtractive change, but it is probably easier to manage losses from technical than value change.
All subtractive change isn't the same: it can be virtuous or exploitive. Virtuous subtraction involves reflection, mindful attention to opportunities for gains in efficiency and value by removing activities and goals. Exploitive subtraction takes things away by shifting burdens without creating new value. Exploitive subtraction is evident in companies that discourage workers from taking all their annual vacation time—workers forego their holidays but realize little value in return. The downsizing movement over the past 30 years similarly exemplifies exploitive subtraction where the activities of former workers (i.e., downsizing victims) are reassigned to their surviving counterparts, leading to increased survivor strain and reduced organizational value (Cascio et al., 1997). Virtuous subtraction in contrast fashions opportunity via removal through stakeholder reflection on ways subtraction can realize new value, for example, by re-bundling activities for synergy to avoid mission creep.
Incorporating Subtractive Change Into Our Suite of Change Processes
Learning how to subtract things is critical to overextended people and organizations—and a new frontier for change scholars and practitioners. Subtractive change executed virtuously requires attention to the dependencies and relationships that make up organizations—a reason why change agents need to know their organizations and stakeholders well when attempting it. I suggest that change scholarship and practice incorporate subtractive change into the suite of change processes they recognize, study, and deploy. Organizational change can mix additive and subtractive change, one leading and lagging the other (Albert, 1984) a way to achieve change goals while protecting human bandwidth and well-being. As Adams and her colleagues confirm, cueing people that subtraction is possible increases its use. In this final section, I highlight some approaches that change scholars and practitioners can take up in promoting virtuous subtraction.
Reflection is key to Virtuous Subtraction
Reflection can prevent retaining suboptimal habits (Gurtner et al., 2007) and thus is a critical feature of virtuous subtractive change. Reflexive thinking is self-aware, improving, and empowered, as reflecting on strategies provides a basis for adapting them. Organizations higher on reflexivity tend to critically revise their working processes, thus implementing better task-related strategies (West, 2000). A familiar approach to subtraction is the heuristic 80/20 rule, identifying key goals and activities to emphasize core features and peel off the ancillary. Yet a danger of unreflective use of this rule of thumb is neglect of attention to unintended consequences. Moreover, it often fails to manage transitions in ways that avoid exploitation, for example, by making thoughtful decisions about subtracted content (e.g., delegation, documentation, and obsolescence). Performance pressures make people reluctant to be reflexive, falling back instead on habit and gut instinct. For this reason, subtractive change under high pressure can become exploitive.
Creating an accurate history can be important to subtractive change, helping people realize what is being let go and what might need to be kept. As Albert (1984) points out, creating a history raises questions about how this practice came about and what roles it has played. A broad understanding of the background and stakeholders of a practice aids virtuous subtraction. That understanding can also come about because people involved in the change have long organizational experience and ties to others who do.
Stakeholder Involvement Differentiates Virtuous From Exploitive Subtraction
Interdependent parties expect to have their interests acknowledged when decisions are made affecting their interests (Wiedner & Mantere, 2019). A key issue in virtuous subtraction is uncovering the stakeholders that a target for subtraction (practice, idea, or activity) might have and getting their inputs and concerns. Fear of stakeholder blowback is part of the reason that additive change is the go-to-approach most managers and change agents use. Many change agents attempt to avoid “politics” rather than working through stakeholder concerns, thus cluttering their organizations with features that “don't spark joy”. A critical issue for stakeholders is whether the subtraction is technical or value-related and efforts taken to incorporate continuity (see Legacy below).
Anticipatory Subtraction can Create new Norms
“Anticipatory subtraction” is the use of built-in time markers and stale dates on rules, procedures, and guidelines to indicate possible future termination. Gawande (2009) in the Checklist Manifesto describes stamping medical checklists with their creation date, reminding users that new evidence might make the current checklist “out of date”. In my own work on idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) employees negotiate (Rousseau, 2005) I note that additions need not last forever to be useful. Special arrangements to help an employee solve a problem or reward effort might be time-limited, lasting long enough to bring benefit before returning to “normal.” (Note some i-deals add and others subtract things, from work hours to duties.) Note that time-limited arrangements come with a vulnerability, as when the banning of automatic weapons in the US was enacted with an expiration date by Congress during a liberal president, that a conservative president failed to renew. However, they offer ways of experimenting and learning. Organizations are otherwise poor at sunsetting practices. Developing a capacity for virtuous subtraction, and with it, temporary addition, can improve the quality of organizing. Periodic updating and anticipatory subtraction can work together.
Legacy Approaches to Terminating Things of Value
Virtuous subtraction entails respect for stakeholders, where respect means worthy of attention. This attention can take the form of transition plans to protect people from losses of status or security as well as ways to recognize the value a practice has provided the organization. Marie Kondo advises us to give thanks to those objects we give way. Treating stakeholders with respect grants them dignity, showing care for their concerns. In his work on subtractive change Albert (1984) asked important questions: How to terminate something suffused with value? How to preserve values at risk in the demise of the old? Creating a sense of continuity is one approach, taking many forms of celebration and acknowledgement. Mobility and retirement bring subtractive change naturally to organizations, hence the farewell and retirement party. Developing rituals for managing the aftermath of subtraction can focus on respect, preservation, and legacy building, transforming potential loss into gain (Walsh & Bartunek, 2012). A further advantage is that such preparations for terminating practices make it harder to return to them. Virtuous subtraction comes with effort and can be a form of stewardship that makes resources available for something new.
Conclusion
Subtraction neglect is real—in our minds and in our organizations. For people and organizations starved of bandwidth, and change scholars and practitioners seeking new capabilities, subtractive change offers opportunity to make organizational change both kinder to people and more effective. To better tap subtraction's value, scholars and practitioners need to recognize the myriad opportunities to subtract virtuously even while adding.
