The following post is an excerpt of a talk that Nexus gave at one of two conferences, held at a large multinational company, on the day that is annually dedicated to a collective reflection on purpose. We will publish it in two parts, corresponding to two blogposts, one, this week, introductory and one, next week, dedicated to a more practical reflection with cues for action.
Some time ago in Nexus we happened to read the book Subtract, written by an American researcher, Leidy Klotz, and the result of a series of observations and research; the book generated in us many reflections, it is as if there had been a before and an after, and these reflections have become transformations both in our work and in our personal lives.
We are telling you about them by linking them to the theme of purpose because, as we shall see, we found the idea of subtraction particularly suitable to celebrate this day and to continue the reflections we started last year around “purpose and regeneration” and “purpose and happiness”.
To warm up, I propose a little exercise… try to think about improving a trip, since we are in the pre-holiday period, think about your next trip and how you could improve it… if you don’t have to travel, think about how you would improve your house and write the results in the chat room… some said they would like a bigger house, a swimming pool, a trip with more time, more stages… others instead, and they are more or less half, reasoned differently, they said “I would like a house with fewer things” or “I would like to get rid of many objects”… perhaps the title of the conference influenced you a little, but this is good because, as we will see, since the idea of subtracting is not intuitive, it is good that there is something, like a title, that when we make a decision helps us to remember it.
I will now show you this figure and ask you how, with the minimum number of moves, to make it symmetrical:
Here again I see that you are now paying attention and in solving many and many have given themselves the opportunity to think about subtracting the top square, rather than adding squares. You may be surprised to know that of the adults who were involved in the same game, only a small fraction, 12%, came up with the solution ‘by subtraction’. The others came up with additive solutions such as this one:
This game is part of a series of activities that were used to test the initial intuition that is the systematic preference for addition, the automatism that makes us think that the solution to a problem lies in addition.
In this seminar we will explore three points together:
- Why do we keep adding?
- What does purpose have to do with subtraction?
- How do we actually subtract?
Leidy Klotz, the researcher and professor at Virginia University who popularized the importance of the concept of ‘subtraction’ through his book ‘Subtract’, tells us that one day he was playing with Lego bricks with his son Ezra and that when faced with the problem of ‘how to improve a construction’, the child spontaneously started to remove bricks, while for him, the father, the natural answer was rather to add Lego pieces. From the surprise, felt by the researcher in this situation, came the intuition that later gave rise to numerous researches, repetitions of the experiment, consolidation of the theory.
But where does it come from, why this compulsion to add? Why do we add to prove we are competent? Why do we keep producing endless checklists for the sake of ticking them off and producing new ones? Why do we keep adding friends on social networks? Why is subtraction not taken into account?
There are several explanations that researchers have hypothesized, partly biological and partly cultural, let us look at some of them together. One hypothesis is that the compulsion to add is linked to other biases, fixed and often unconscious reasoning routines of our brain. For example, the sunk cost, i.e. the bias that makes it difficult to disinvest once we have invested because we perceive the losses and not the possible gains (that bias for which once we have paid the cinema ticket we stay even if we do not like the film, to put it in simple terms).
More generally, loss aversion could be another explanation, along with favouring the status quo over uncertainty due to change. Another, very fascinating, explanation could come from afar, from the evolution of the human species from nomadic to sedentary and, with the conquest of sedentarity and agriculture, from the acquired possibility/need to start accumulating objects, food, etc. in dwellings that became fixed and in urban agglomerations. And in this evolution, the search and accumulation of food becomes crucial for survival and continues to drive us despite modern conditions of relative abundance.
It should not be forgotten, however, that evolution is a balancing act between adding and subtracting, think for example of the ability to work with wood; but also of the very interesting phenomenon that takes place in our brains, which we might familiarly call ‘synapse pruning’ that allows us to regenerate our brains during the night’s rest, eliminating what is not being used so as not to waste energy in its maintenance. And nature teaches us the same thing. In a healthy ecosystem, nature selects and promotes life on the one hand (thus adding) and at the same time promotes death by helping what is no longer needed to die. It is the process called regeneration that we talked about last year in relation to corporate purpose.
So perhaps we can reconnect with subtraction, but we have to make a little effort.
The compulsion to add can in fact cost us dearly: adding work all the time, adding meeting after meeting to a project, adding tasks to the to-do list, adding items in the house, food, cigarettes, social engagements, friends on social networks… The costs that the habit of adding generates are very high.
On an individual level, the stress, the feeling of never having finished, of being out of control, the ‘mental load’ that makes us wake up at night because we remember something we haven’t done, the cluttering of our homes with useless objects… and on a collective level the excessive consumption that is making our planet uninhabitable.