Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off
By acknowledging our neglect of subtraction, we can overcome it
Ask a data scientist with some experience, and she’ll probably tell you about a predictive model that achieved better performance after she decided to remove some of its input variables.
Ask employees what they think might help improve morale, and they might tell you that reducing the number of meetings they have to attend every week would be a great start.
But that’s not how the human brain typically works. Whenever a business experiences an obstacle, the most common reaction from its leaders is to think of something that can be added to make things better. An array of biological, cultural, and economic factors is constantly pushing us toward more, even when subtraction would bring more practical value:
“Our model to predict customer churn is no longer accurate? Let’s look for some new data sources we can use to increase the number of input variables!”
“The new employee engagement survey came back with low job satisfaction numbers? Let’s create a new employee recognition program!”
Fashion designer Coco Chanel is the author of the quote I used as this post’s title. I don’t know how helpful her literal advice is these days when many of us are already minimalist in the way we dress. My husband and I don’t wear jewelry or even a wedding ring; sunglasses, a mask, and our phone/wallet are the only accessories we typically carry. It’s not as if it would be easy to leave one thing behind without being either uncomfortable or indecent.
But when we extrapolate to other areas, like business, product design, and data analytics, this advice can be incredibly useful.
Product designer Mehek Kapoor writes about her experience failing an UX assignment when applying to a job at Microsoft:
Putting everything into any design or an app is always a bad idea. And that was when I learnt it! My FinTech app did everything, from mutual funds to smart deposits, to systematic investment plans to calls and puts, from share market evaluation to charts of various shares, from SEBI’s investment book to various articles and resource material on economics—you could find everything there. Every. Single. Damn. Thing. It was so complicated that while explaining it to the lead designer, even I got confused about what a particular feature did, and how another feature functioned! What could be the worst first-impression of a UX Designer than someone who can’t understand how her own app works?
According to Leidy Klotz,
Our mental preference for addition—for adding to what’s already there rather than thinking of taking away—is so wide-spread and strong that we would prefer to accommodate wrong ideas than simply remove them.
The first step to correct this problem is to recognize our bias toward addition and neglect of subtraction.
Then, every time we’re facing a challenge, we can get in the habit of metaphorically looking in the mirror and asking, “Before I leave, what can I take off?”