Transcript for Innovation 2.0: Do Less

Thanks, Shankar. It's great to be here.

Yeah, so for those of listeners that have enough sense not to major in engineering mechanics is this branch of physics that deals with objects that rest in emotion. And it requires you to go from plugging numbers into equations to actually visualizing how the concepts work in the world. In my approach to mechanics was the approach that I'd been using in all my courses up to that point, which was, okay, Figure out how to solve the problems that I've been assigned for homework. Learn that specific problem and try to cram as many of those into my brain as possible so that when the exam came about, I'd be more likely to have an exact replica of the problem that was on the exam already accessible in my brain.

had a sea average. So I was I was coming in it was a serious I mean I was coming into the third exam with the sea average and for the first time in my life I was in danger of failing the course and if that happened I would either have to delay my degree progress and ask my parents to pay extra tuition to take the course the following year or change my major to something that didn't require me to pass mechanics.

I just really stripped away the extraneous things that I was trying to cram into my brain. And this first mechanics class really just boils down to applying new and second law of motion. So all of these scenarios can be described by force equals mass times acceleration. And I could derive everything I needed from that equation. And so before that third exam, I stopped memorizing dozens of other equations and tangential ideas. I didn't need to know a bunch of forces and masses and accelerations. I just needed to remember that formula, F equals MA.

I'll never forget it. I mean, this is Professor Viscomi, just a classic nice engineering professor. But he had this thing where when he handed the exams back, he would write the highest and lowest score on the chalkboard to give you a sense of kind of how the rest of the class did. And so this exam, he, he comes in and he writes on the board a 98 and a 47. And then he looked at me and smirked. And everybody assumed that I had gotten the 47. My classmates were playfully, you know, cheering me. And I'm sitting there thinking about like, OK, now that I've failed out of engineering, well, my major B. And when I got my test back, I realized why he had smirked and it was because I had earned the 98.

He was three at the time and we were building a bridge out of his duplop locks, the bigger legos. And the support towers were different heights so we couldn't span them. They weren't level. And as I turned back toward the soon to be bridge, Ezra had already removed a block from the taller tower. So whereas my impulse had been to add to the short support in that moment I realized that it wasn't the only way to create a level bridge.

Yeah, you know, students would come to talk to me about their assignments and I'd give them this bridge and see what they did and everybody added like me. And then I also took it to Gabe Adams who's a professor colleague of mine and I thought that I had been talking to her about these ideas and plus she's like a genius. So I figured, okay, she's the one who's going to subtract here when I give her this. And so I give it to her and she added like me, but then when I said, hey, this is what Ezra did. She says, oh, oh, oh, so what you've been trying to say is that you're interested in why why do we overlook subtraction as a way to improve things?

Oh, she's a fascinating person. She was the first female licensed architect in the state of Pennsylvania. She played basketball in college. She was one of the first women to drive a car. She was also a serial inventor. And she made one of the most ingenious advances of the 20th century. Before Anna Kijklin, building blocks were solid. So if your house is more than a century old, it probably rests on solid blocks. In her pet end, and I think this was 1927, Kijklin invented the K-Bric, which started to subtract some of the mass from building blocks. What she essentially did was create a hollow block, knowing that the load bearing could happen on the outside parts of the block. And by creating the hollow block, you remove half the material, compared to what was in the typical building block, which of course makes it less expensive and easier to build with. and less fuel to transport, and then these hollow blocks also provide more insulation because of the air voids that are in the blocks. So the resulting buildings are more comfortable, less known to fire, and the block itself is less expensive. And her subtractive insight, it's since gone through several evolutions, but it's led to this building block that's now ubiquitous, it's used to build everything from the facades of schools and skyscrapers to the foundation walls for my two-story edition.

These are the pedalless mini bikes that basically allow kids as soon as one and a half years old to ride a bike. And the way they work, they're small bikes, but they're not propelled by chains and pedals, but by toddlers striding with their legs. That's why they're called strider bikes. And what happens is the toddler propels the bike forward, kind of like a Flintstone cars. And what's even more impressive is once my son is since aged out of the strider bike, and once he decided it was time for his big kid bike, We didn't have to bother with training wheels. He already knew how to balance and he just needed to learn how to push the pedals and, of course, to break. And children's bikes were marketed as their own distinct class of bicycle for almost a century. And there are plenty of design changes over that time, right? Training wheels, fatter tires, more and more speeds, you know, those contraptions that connect a kids bike to a grown-ups like a Kabus. And it took a really long time for somebody to have the insight of, hey, will this be better if we subtract the pedals and the drive train? And when they did think of it, it made these two-wheeled bikes rideable for a whole new age group and scalable to their parents.

Sure. So we moved to University of Virginia and we downsized our home when we moved here. And the home had also been a student rental. And so we knew that we were going to have to do a renovation. Subtraction was top of mind. And I'm a engineer slash architect, I guess, by profession. And so I was like, can we put subtraction into play here? And so the name of our contest was addition by subtraction. And I have the great fortune of working with really smart students for whom I ran a design contest. And we emphasized that our goal was to subtract. And we even said that we were willing to pay more if the renovation could make a statement through subtraction. And I offered $1,000 in cash and free cookies and a couple of dozen architecture engineering and environmental design type majors signed up. But the, and the students came up with clever designs. There was one student who found unused vertical space in in our house and used that to add it a lofted area to Ezra's bedroom. There was a junior who changed the grading of our backyard and that provided outside access to the basement, which then turned that into a viable living space. And there was this graduate student team that kind of intricately reconfigured the entire floor plan. And all of those things would have made our house more livable. And yet no one had actually subtracted, right? Nobody had taken away square footage.

My wife was worried you had asked. So, because now we have a five room to story 900 square foot addition that extends from the rear of what had been a little keep cut.

Yeah, for us, I mean, this is the biggest investment our family has, and the You kind of rule of thumb for homes, values, how Zillow calculates it, how the realtor is calculated. When they're appraising it, is that the value increases with the total square footage. So, you know, 2000 square foot, that's one price. If you have 2500 square feet, that's another price. And entrance in the design competition and Monica and I could just never figure out a way past this financial reality. I mean, spending money without adding square footage would have been a really risky investment. and spending money to get rid of existing square footage was preposterous. Another thing was, this was just, it's not that subtracting is always the right option. We did, it has been beneficial to have more square footage in our home, our family was growing and we did need some more square footage. So this may have been a case where subtracting wasn't the better option, even though we started out with that as our intention.

Exactly. If we had hired a contractor to subtract space, you know, they're getting paid based on the percentage of how much it costs them to do the renovation. And if so, a less expensive renovation that subtract space, they get less overhead on that.

Well, I mean, it's right there in the word, right? I mean, the synonym for home renovation is a home addition. You never hear of a home subtraction.

Certainly, in human history, let's start there. That's this concept of monumental architecture. And again, on my background's engineering, I like big structures. I was surprised to learn about how key role people think or the scientists think monumental architecture played in the development of civilization.

It's literally defined by the fact that it adds well beyond what is necessary. So the principle defining feature of monumental architecture is that the scale and, you know, elaboration and detail exceed the requirements of any practical functions. So the ziggas and messets patemia, the pyramids of Egypt and China, these massive but marginally useful structures kind of grew at the same time as the cities around them.

Exactly. I mean, that's a huge challenge on university campuses. For example, right? It's so much easier to get a donation for somebody to create a building that has their families name on it, then to, you know, a donation for removing something or for even for something that doesn't come with this big physical reminder of the person's generosity.

Across all of these examples, the problem is that it's subtracting is more work, it's more mental work, it's more kind of steps as we're talking about it, and there's less to show for it. And so after you do all this extra work, you have less evidence because the thing that you've done is by definition disappeared.

Yeah, we had a new latest strategic planning effort with a new president and it's began as these tend to by soliciting ideas from students, faculty, staff, community, alumni members, donors, and all of them were basically offering their ideas for how to improve the university. We got our hands on the data, and as expected, the adding was rampant. I mean, people wanted more study abroad grants, more mental health services, tailored to international students, more housing options. There was a request for a new ice arena, and I didn't know we had a ice hockey team here, but I'm just assuming that's progress too. The thing is surely there was untapped potential because out of 750 ideas for changing the university, fewer than 10% suggested taking something away.

Certainly, there's politeness. And then there's also just it's kind of a good decision making shortcut to not come in and say, oh, here's something we definitely should subtract from this organization. If until you understand how the organization works, right? I mean, so it's pretty bold for somebody to say, hey, let's get rid of the ice hockey team before you understand how, you know, what they're contributing to the university, the history of the ice hockey team and so on and so forth to add something you can just say, well, this would make anything better. So let's add it to our system that I don't really understand.

Yes, Stephanie is one of my favorite researchers. She's a psychologist at the University of Michigan, and she knows more than anybody about what she calls aquisitiveness, which is how and why we get and keep things. So for example, one of my favorite studies of hers participants are shown more than 100 different objects in random order and one at a time. And then as each object appears on the screen, participants are asked whether they would like to acquire it virtually. It's all imaginary. They know they won't actually get these things. And they can acquire as many or as few as they want. And the objects vary in their usefulness. So there are things like bananas and coffee mugs and extension cords. Things you might pick up. Others seem less useful, but people do still pick up, like empty two liter bottles used sticky notes, outdated newspapers. And once they have made a choice about each of these 100 objects, participants are then shown everything that they've added. So if you've acquired 70 things, you're shown all 70 things together on the screen, and then you're encouraged to subtract. Then they're challenged to whittle down their collection so that it can fit into a shopping cart on the computer screen. And finally they're asked to make it even smaller so that it can fit into one virtual paper grocery bag. So the goal is very clear. Everything needs to fit into one grocery bag or else you don't complete the task. And you're getting real-time feedback displayed on the screen of whether you've subtracted enough stuff. and a lot of participants fail to get it down to a single bag and many don't even make it past the shopping cart.

One way that the neuroscientists have studied this is, you know, hooking people up to their brain imaging machines while they're acquiring things. And so food acquisition, as well as other types of acquisition, activate this same reward system in the brain. So it's this pathway connects basically the thinking and the feeling parts of our brain. And this is what makes it pleasurable to eat. And it can also be stimulated as we know by drugs like cocaine, website designs that keep us clicking and scrolling. And then for hoarders, even the used sticky notes can kind of stimulate this reward pathway. So that's, and so when you do find that a specific reward system like this one is playing a role, it confirms just how deep rooted some of our tendency to add might be.

Well so yeah we go to the outer bank sometimes and that's the islands off of North Carolina and so your day can look something like going to look at Kitty Hawk and see where the Wright brothers did their thing and there's you know go see some sand dunes and you can go out to eat and you could drive down and look at all the lighthouses or you could kind of just let the day come to you and maybe do some looking for shells on the beach and see what happens for lunch and have a less scheduled day there. And so I'm more on the prefer the latter kind of vacation, my wife Monica likes to pack in as many activities as possible.

Well, it's not a dispute. I mean, she's right, right? But this is worse than even anything Monica would schedule. So we created this itinerary for a day spent in Washington, D.C. So now we're back in the experimental world again. And over the course of 14 hours, this high-tenerary head participants visiting major tourist sites, like the White House, the National Cathedral, the old post office. And then have them paying their respects at the various memorials, like the Lincoln and the Veterans Memorial. a museum visit shopping and lunch at a five-star bistro. So just travel time between all these stops would exceed two hours assuming optimal DC traffic, which never happens. Participants saw this original itinerary in like kind of a drag and drop interface on the computer screen and they could change their itinerary by rearraging, adding and subtracting activities. And even with this jam packed, itinerary only one in four participants removed activities from the packed original.

They, well, some rearranged, but most added.

I mean, there's not time, but it was possible to kind of collect something, you know, drag and drop another task. And it was enticing when they saw the other tasks sitting in there on the side. I think they were thinking, oh, that would be a fun thing to do. And it's kind of the same as the strategic planning. You think, okay, adding more good stuff is always good. And in this case, it was just going to make the overall schedule even more impossible and more crowded and less pleasant.

Anybody who spends time playing with words on paper on a screen has heard the advice, right? You know, strunken white, they're the most assigned textbook on college and high school syllabi and their classic advice is omit needless words that editing is the way to make your writing more clear. And yet that's very obviously a form of subtracting, right? You're taking something that you've created and now you're taking things away from it. So we gave people a summary of an article and said, how would you make this better? And only 17% ended up subtracting words from the original. So by and large, they added to make the summaries better.

Oh yeah, we found this in so many contexts. I mean, people improving a five ingredient recipe to out of 90 participants subtracted when they transformed loops of musical notes. They were more likely to add notes than to take them away. So this was we found this across many different contexts.

Yeah, like so many other city crossing highways in the United States, the Embarkadero Freeway was built after World War II, and it was made possible by federal support for highways to move the military and and served the growing number of automobiles that stretched for more than a mile along the eastern waterfront, and it blocked precious views and access to the bay. And so, you know, planners started to think, well, is this costing more than it's adding? And finally, the planning commission said, and this is in the mid-80s, we should get rid of the embarked arrow freeway.

Not good. But this one actually got put to a vote and it wasn't even close. For every voter and favor of removing it, there were two who wanted to keep it. And whether it was for, you know, fear of traffic, fear of loss business, fear of change, voters rejected it. And the people had spoken. I mean, so the planning commission basically moved on and focused on other projects.

Well, a number of ways, so the earthquake killed more than 60 people and injured thousands. A lot of the deaths actually happened on a similar double-decker highway, the Cypress Street via duct. in Oakland, and so people seeing this double-decker elevated concrete structure just over a mile in length. They looked ominously like the Embarked Arrow. And then it also gave people a view of what life would be like if you didn't have the Embarked Arrow, because the Embarked Arrow didn't collapse during the earthquake, but it was rendered unusable for a while. And so people saw that they found other ways to get around the city and that it didn't kind of totally ruin life in San Francisco to not have the embarked arrow.

It was still, it wasn't, like, it was by no means a unanimous choice. I mean, there's a famous Pulitzer Prize-winning San Francisco Chronicle columnist in his name's Herb Kane, and he's such an influential columnist. And even after the earthquake, as people brought this discussion back up, he has this great quote, once again, there's serious talk about tearing down the embarcadero freeway. and even worse idea than building it. And so there was still resistance. But eventually the freeway came down. And when it was removed, they got the waterfront back. They saw an increase in housing, increase in jobs. It didn't cause traffic nightmare, trips were rerouted. And if you've ever visited there, it's one of the most visited places in the world. And it's obvious why it shouldn't be covered. with the freeways. So it took about 10 years, but by 2000, kind of the 10-year anniversary of the demolition, the Chronicle was then reporting that it was hard to find anyone who thinks ripping down the freeway was a bad idea.

Yeah, I mean, I think it horrific cost that's given us this singular chance for change and forced us to subtract in ways that we never would have managed on our own. And certainly, I don't advocate subtracting family visits and friendly hugs, but we've also had to get rid of things like buffays and commutes and evictions and even carbon emissions. So I think that the crises interrupts this normal flow of things and shows us what a world with some of these subtractions might look like.

Yeah, emotionally and cognitively difficult. And even if you look at evolution as a metaphor, the way that it works is through adaptation and then selection. So adaptation is an ad and then the selection is a subtraction and they're working hand in hand. And I think another fundamental disadvantage that's coming into play here is that we don't get as many reminders of subtraction, right? Because when something is added, there it is right in front of you as evidence that this adding this thing was a way to make change. If something was subtracted in the rare cases that we do it and follow through with it, it's by definition gone. So as we walk around in the world, we don't have these external reminders that, hey, here's this subtraction. It's also a good way to make things better.

He finally got to Nike, which at the time was kind of this boutique outfit that just served elite runners. And as the story goes in Nike lore, Phil Knight took him out for a run, liked what he felt, and then air went into the Nike shoes. But for even after the air was in the shoes, nobody could see it. And so, but the Nike really started to take off, they had this kind of seminal shoe, the Air Max one. And those shoes were one of the first models that actually displayed the air. So they have the little window on the side. So you could see, hey, in fact, there's air in here. And that made the subtraction noticeable and it was something that made Nike shoes different from any other kind of shoe and kind of help launch them on the path. that took them to where they are today. Of course, there's a guy named Michael Jordan who helped.

A stop-doing list is essentially the same as a two-do list, except for your thinking of things that you're not going to do anymore. And what I, how I use it is whenever I do my two-do's, which I try to do on a weekly basis, I also force myself to come up with a equivalent number of stop-doings, which kind of makes sense, right? If you're gonna add new stuff to your day and assuming you're already at capacity, you need to also figure out what you're going to take away.

One that's been really helpful for me is it's basically a stop editing and this is I read a lot of my students writing and it can be really tempting to just go through and make all of the changes that I would want to make but of course that's not really helpful to them and so I like I'll set a limit I'll say okay. give this student the ten most important comments for this person writing and it works really well I mean it saves me time one but it also kind of rewards students who do more right so if the student gives you a really polished piece of writing I still force myself to come up with ten ways to make it better whereas if somebody doesn't put as much time in and gives you this really rough first draft. I don't spend all my time getting that to the same place that the other piece of writing is. Another example is just meetings. Meetings are the classic thing where I am providing some marginal value by attending a meeting or by calling a meeting, but not considering what could be done in that time. So I think oftentimes my stop-doings are directed at meetings that I'm attending, but also the ones that I'm calling and asking other people to attend for me.

Yeah, I did some digging into how much laws have grown over time. And you know, by some measures, they've grown even faster than our economy. So it's just like all these things have this adding trend and laws are no exception. And it's the same as the building of civilization when you don't have roads, it makes sense to add them. But once you've kind of been adding roads for a while, there are more opportunities to take them away to reveal pristine water. And so the laws, you know, we've kind of accumulated accumulated and we're left with a bunch that are redundant. And so some places have actually required legislators to when they come with a new law also come with two that are on the books that they want to get rid of. And that kind of rule can be really helpful. I mean, it's saying, look, you're a competent legislator if you do this.

Yeah, my sister is a medical doctor and she was actually taught by this guy Peter Pronevost and what Pronevost was interested in was improving the practice of inserting central line catheters. So these are those thin plastic tubes that are used to draw blood or administer fluids and medication.

And it's not a sexy topic certainly, but these infections were actually causing about 30,000 deaths each year in the United States. Roughly as many as car accidents. And it's a complicated process. There are dozens of steps requiring thought in judgment and skill, and it's different based on the person. If you've got a 10-year-old who's dehydrated, it's a different process than inserting one on a concussed offensive lineman, for example. To prevent the infections, Pronevost and his team considered all of this complexity, but then they proposed a very simple recipe. They gave a checklist, and it's that medical professionals would wash their hands with soap. Clean the patient's skin with antiseptic, put sterile drapes over the entire patient, wear a sterile mask hat gown and gloves, and put a sterile dressing over the catheter site. And those very simple steps have brought striking results. It's almost entirely eradicated catheter infections and it saved thousands of lives.

Yeah, a reluctant fan. I mean, as a professor, I felt like, oh, I can't be a condo at the light. But talking about our research, people would keep bringing her up. So I said, I got to figure out what she's writing about. And, you know, of course her tone and observations advice are very spiritual. But through trial and error in this her specific context, tidying, she's derived some tips that are pretty scientifically sound. For example, her core message is sparking joy. default or home organization advice is like get rid of the stuff you don't want that doesn't fit and she flipped it around she said keep what sparks joy and get rid of everything else and so she's kind of steering us around loss of version there knowingly or not because she's focusing us on this, you know, this future vision of the tidy space and share it's a little painful to get rid of these individual things, but you're just thinking of them as one component that's going to improve the overall situation.

I mean, it's hard to find an expert who doesn't have some counterintuitive, seemingly counterintuitive advice on how to subtract, right? So Picasso defining art is the elimination of the unnecessary. And then you've got the little princess author saying, Perfections achieve, not when there's nothing more to add, but when there's nothing left to take away. We talked about strunken white. I'm at needless words. This goes way back. I mean, you've got William Avakum of Arkham's Razor fame. And his quote is, it's in vain to do with more what can be done with less. And then, a quote that gets attributed to Lao Tsu, to attain knowledge at things every day, to attain wisdom, subtract things every day. And that's two and a half millennia back. And I think I learned a ton from these new and old prophets of subtraction, but the main takeaway is that they're the exceptions proving the rule, right? They're advice and doors because we are still neglecting subtraction.

Thanks so much for having me.