Do More With Less

When we plan what to work on in the future, we typically focus on adding new products, new features, and new use cases. It’s quite unusual to instead plan to subtract features, products, or use cases.

The evidence that people are biased in favor of adding rather than subtracting is quite compelling. In a 2021 Nature study, Adams, Converse, Hales & Klotz found that people systematically default to additive changes when faced with a problem. They demonstrated this finding across eight different experiments. For example, they gave participants this Lego structure and asked them to make it stable. The majority of participants chose to add blocks rather than removing the extraneous blue block, even though they were “charged” money to add blocks but not to take them away. This was replicated in a follow-up French study, which found essentially the same results.

Why?

I can identify three reasons that we have this bias.

Scarcity mindset. Michael Easter wrote about how our evolutionary past in an environment of scarcity causes us to always want “more, more, more.” This applies just as well to ideas as to physical possessions. If faced with two options, we are likely to select the one that offers more (perhaps this explains the general popularity of The Cheesecake Factory).

Additive ideas require less cognitive effort. They come to mind more quickly than subtractive ideas. Often we don’t spend much time considering all ideas before jumping in, so this gives additive ideas a natural advantage. The reason for this is likely just that it’s easier to think of one shiny new thing than to consider all the possible options for removal.

Rewards for addition are better. The above factors reflect “System 1” thinking, while “System 2” can also be subject to a bias in favor of addition. This is simply because it’s much more common to reward additions than subtractions. We put people’s names on buildings, have ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and launch parties. We give out bonuses and raises for successfully shipping. We never do any of that for subtracting.

Less is More

Yet not everyone falls victim to this way of thinking. Steve Jobs famously killed 70% of Apple’s products when he returned in 1997. Warren Buffett summarized this philosophy when he said, “the stock market is a no-called-strike game. You don’t have to swing at everything—you can wait for your pitch.” Hans Monderman reduced traffic accidents by removing road signs and traffic signals. Nassim Taleb wrote that “actions that remove are more robust than those that add because addition may have unseen, complicated feedback loops.” Indeed it is the unusual nature of these ideas that causes us to appreciate these quotes.

The motivation for this is twofold. First, by paring down we can focus on the most valuable opportunities. Since there are usually decreasing marginal benefits to investments, this allows for increasing average returns. And second, we can be much more accurate in knowing what to remove than what to add, because we already know the effect it has. Adding something new, on the other hand, requires considering hypothetical interactions with all the parts of the existing system. Hence the prevalence of the “law of unintended consequences”.

This isn’t to say it’s never correct to add. Obviously human civilization wouldn’t have achieved what it has if we had followed that philosophy. Yet because we have such a strong bias in the opposite direction, it’s worthwhile to do a little bit of extra work to fight against it. When faced with a problem, instead of asking “how can we improve?”, we should first ask “how can we simplify?”