Why Leaders Keep Adding When They Should Subtract

Leaders often respond to complexity by adding meetings, metrics, tools, approvals, and initiatives. Yet accumulation can slow decisions, dilute focus, and consume the attention needed for strategic work.

This episode explores strategic subtraction as a disciplined approach to removing work and complexity that no longer create proportional value.

TLDR / At a Glance

• The cognitive bias toward additive solutions
• Why organisations reward launches over retirements
• Execution drag from meetings, handoffs, and governance
• Planned abandonment and sharper decision rights
• Practical examples from Shopify, ING, and Costco
• Protecting resilience, trust, compliance, and capability
• Strong leadership requires knowing what to stop, simplify, or remove so essential work has room to succeed.

Every time work feels messy, the instinct is to add: another meeting, another approval, another dashboard, another KPI, another programme. It looks like action, but it often creates the very complexity we are trying to escape. We unpack why additive leadership is so tempting, why subtraction feels risky, and how “planned abandonment” turns stopping work into a serious strategic choice rather than an act of neglect.

We connect the psychology to the system: organisations are brilliant at launching things and far less mature at retiring them. The result is coordination overhead that eats the week, slower decisions driven by unclear decision rights, and a steady build-up of execution drag. We also explore the human cost, from fragmented attention that kills deep work and innovation to the burnout signals that come with unmanageable workload and constant alignment.

Then we get concrete. We look at real-world examples of strategic subtraction across different levels: Shopify tackling meeting overload, ING cutting bureaucracy and handoffs, and Costco using constrained product range as a competitive advantage. Finally, we add a crucial warning: not all complexity is bad. Smart strategic subtraction protects resilience, compliance, and safety while removing approvals, reports, and legacy initiatives that no longer earn their place.

If you want faster execution and clearer focus without breaking what keeps the organisation safe, press play. 

Subscribe, share with a leader who keeps adding, and leave a review, then tell us: what would you stop or simplify first?

Transcript

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Why Subtraction Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Why leaders keep adding when they should subtract Introduction This is the first of three articles on strategic subtraction, a practical discipline within strategic intelligence. It is about deciding what no longer deserves time, money, attention, or capacity, and removing it without weakening the organization. Leaders often respond to complexity by adding more, more initiatives, meetings, KPEs, tools, processes, and governance. Strategic subtraction asks a different question. What should we stop, simplify, or remove so the work that matters has more room to succeed? Why

The Bias Towards Adding More

SPEAKER_00 0:41

leaders default to addition? Addition is attractive because it gives leadership action a visible form, a program to announce, a KPI to track, a governance forum to chair, or an initiative to report against. These moves can make leaders appear decisive and in control, even when they add more complexity to an already stretched organization. Subtraction is harder because its value is less visible. Removing a meeting, retiring a report, simplifying a process, or closing a legacy work stream rarely creates the same public signal of progress, and it often creates political friction, because the work being removed usually has an owner, sponsor, audience, or defender. This bias is not just organizational, it is cognitive. Research published in Nature found that people often overlook subtractive solutions, even when removing something would be simpler or more effective than adding something new. Lydie Klotz later made the organizational implication clear in Harvard Business Review. When stakeholders generated hundreds of improvement ideas, fewer than 10% involved taking something away. Under pressure, this tendency becomes even stronger because cognitive load, distraction, and urgency make subtractive options harder to notice. This matters because most executive environments are already overloaded. When leaders are busy, under pressure, and surrounded by competing demands, the easiest response is often to add another mechanism of control, another meeting, another dashboard, another approval step, another transformation work stream. Each individual addition can appear reasonable. The damage comes from accumulation. Over time, the organization becomes full of activity that once had a rationale but now absorbs attention without improving performance.

How Organisations Reward Addition

SPEAKER_00 2:35

Why organizations reward addition? The organizational system reinforces the psychology. Most businesses have mature machinery for launching things, investment processes, steering committees, project governance frameworks, communications plans, transformation offices, and quarterly updates designed to support expansion and growth. Far fewer organizations have mature machinery for stopping things. Few executives are rewarded for removing unnecessary reporting. Few teams celebrate the retirement of redundant governance forums. Most organizations track launches carefully, but very few systematically track what should be consolidated, simplified, or abandoned. Addition has visibility. Subtraction often looks like absence, even when it is the more valuable leadership act. Peter Drucker recognized this decades ago through his idea of planned abandonment. He argued that organizations should regularly ask whether they would start an existing activity again today, knowing what they now know. If the answer is no, the activity should be considered for retirement. That principle matters because strategy is not only a discipline of choosing what to start, it is also a discipline of deciding what no longer deserves time, money, leadership attention, or organizational energy. Leaders can feel productive because the organization appears active, but activity and strategic coherence are not the same thing. A serious strategy must make subtraction normal, otherwise every new priority simply lands on top of the old one.

The Hidden Cost Of Busyness

SPEAKER_00 4:10

How additive busyness creates organizational drag. The cost of constant addition is increasingly measurable. Asana reports that 53% of employee time is consumed by busy work and coordination overhead. Atlassian's workplace research suggests teams are spending increasing amounts of time in unnecessary meetings rather than progressing important work. The pattern is practical, not abstract. Every additional meeting creates coordination cost, every additional tool increases switching friction, every additional approval slows decision latency, every additional KPI fragments attention, and every additional governance layer increases the number of handoffs required to move work forward. Over time, organizations accumulate what can best be described as execution drag. Work continues, but movement becomes harder. Decisions take longer, ownership becomes less clear. Teams spend more time aligning, updating, reporting, and waiting than solving the real problem. Deloitte researched organizational decision effectiveness and found that unclear decision rights are a major source of delay because teams do not always know who has authority to decide, who needs to be consulted, and who owns the outcome. That matters here because many organizations respond to slow decisions by adding more governance, when the real problem is often decision ambiguity. Another form, approval step, or review layer, will not improve execution unless it clarifies who decides, who owns, and who is accountable when progress stalls. Innovation capacity suffers as well. Microsoft's research found that employees struggling for time and energy are significantly more likely to struggle with strategic thinking and innovation. Cal Newport's work on deep work reinforces the same point. Cognitively demanding work requires uninterrupted concentration, not constant fragmentation. When organizations overload calendars, coordination channels and workflows, they are not simply consuming time. They are degrading the cognitive conditions required for high quality thinking. Gallup's burnout research adds the human dimension. Burnout correlates strongly with unmanageable workload, unclear priorities, and persistent coordination overload.

Real Examples Of Subtraction

SPEAKER_00 6:36

What strategic subtraction actually looks like? Shopify removed large numbers of recurring meetings and reinstated no meeting Wednesdays. According to reporting in Fast Company, this eliminated roughly 10,000 recurring calendar events and released tens of thousands of hours back into the organization. The significance is not the exact number, it is the principle. Meeting overload was treated as a subtractable design problem rather than an unavoidable consequence of scale. ING's agile transformation provides another example. McKinsey documented how ING deliberately reduced bureaucracy, steering committees, project management layers, and unnecessary handoffs as part of its operating model redesign. The goal was not simply speed, it was clear ownership and reduced coordination friction. Costco illustrates subtraction strategically through product architecture. Its deliberately constrained SKU range simplifies operations, strengthens buying leverage, and sharpens its value proposition. Fewer choices become a strategic advantage because complexity is intentionally constrained. These examples matter because they show subtraction operating at different levels meetings, governance, operating model design, product architecture, and customer experience. Strategic subtraction can remove calendar burden, simplify decision making, reduce customer friction, clarify ownership, or constrain product complexity. The common thread is not less. The common thread is better fit between the work being done and the value being created.

Subtracting Without Doing Damage

SPEAKER_00 8:19

Subtraction without damage. There is an important caution here. Not all complexity is bad. Some complexity protects resilience, compliance, customer choice, operational redundancy, or safety. In highly regulated sectors, removing controls too aggressively can create risk rather than eliminate it. Yves Morieux's work on smart simplicity is useful because it distinguishes between valuable complexity and unnecessary complicatedness. The problem is not complexity itself. The problem is complexity that consumes coordination effort without creating proportional strategic value. This is why strategic subtraction must be disciplined rather than ideological. Removing resilience capacity to hit a short-term cost target is not strategic subtraction. Removing unnecessary approvals that delayed decisions without improving quality may be. Removing people before removing broken work is not strategic subtraction. Removing duplicated reports, unclear handoffs, and legacy initiatives that no longer support strategy may be. The goal is not less for the sake of less. The goal is a better fit between the organization's strategic ambition and the amount of work, process, control, and coordination it can realistically absorb.

Questions Leaders Should Ask

SPEAKER_00 9:40

Questions leaders should ask now. What would we not start today if it did not already exist? What work has survived because no one owns the decision to stop it? What are we adding without removing anything in return? Which meetings, reports, tools, or approvals consume attention without improving decisions? Where are we mistaking visible activity for value? Which forms of complexity create value and which merely preserve internal comfort? These questions shift the conversation from activity to coherence. They force leaders to confront the hidden cost of accumulation and create space for more deliberate choices. They also make subtraction visible. Instead of treating removal as neglect, they position it as a serious act of leadership judgment.

Closing Thoughts And Part Two

SPEAKER_00 10:31

Conclusion Leaders do not usually add because they are careless. They add because addition feels active, visible, and safe. But over time, additive leadership creates drag, more work, slower decisions, weaker focus, and less strategic coherence. Strategic subtraction is the discipline of protecting the organization from that accumulation. For leaders, the harder task is not recognizing the need to subtract. It is deciding what can be removed without weakening capability, resilience, trust, or execution. The strongest leaders are not those who keep adding activity to prove momentum. They are the ones disciplined enough to remove what no longer deserves the organization's attention. Part two will move from the case for subtraction to the practice of it, how leaders decide what should be removed, what must be protected, and how to subtract without weakening the organization. This concludes the article.

Read More On LinkedIn

SPEAKER_00 11:30

You can also read this article on my LinkedIn page, where I share regular insights on AI, strategy, and emerging technologies.