How to Solve a Problem Before It Happens & When Less is Really More

Ask anyone if they prefer fresh or frozen fish and almost everyone says – Fresh! But it turns out to be not so simple. A lot of fish you think is fresh may have been frozen at some point. This episode begins by unraveling this issue of fresh or frozen fish and which is better. https://www.thespruceeats.com/frozen-fish-better-than-fresh-fish-1300625 How do you solve a problem before it even becomes a problem? The perfect example is changing the oil in your car. You do that to prevent problems from happening later. And it turns out a lot of problems in life can be solved – or prevented - that way if we just change how we look at them. That’s according to Dan Heath author of the book Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen (https://amzn.to/3atB1Os). Listen as he reveals this way of preventing problems that everyone can put into practice. Our tendency is to add. When the government sees a problem, they add a new law. When there is a problem at work, management adds a new rule. We add. But what if a better solution is to subtract? Take away a law or a rule or remove an obstacle. We tend not to think that way, but we should according to my guest Leidy Klotz. Leidy is a professor of engineering and architecture at the University of Virginia and author of the book Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less (https://amzn.to/3olHXG5). If you have a sweet tooth you would like to tame – the solution just might be a pickle! Listen as I explain. http://www.wisegeek.com/why-do-some-pregnant-women-crave-pickles-and-ice-cream.htm PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! MINT MOBILE: Ditch overpriced wireless and get 3 months of premium wireless service from Mint Mobile for 15 bucks a month at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://MintMobile.com/something⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ! FACTOR: Eat smart with Factor! Get 50% off at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://FactorMeals.com/something50off⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ROCKET MONEY: Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://RocketMoney.com/SOMETHING⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ QUINCE: Elevate your shopping with Quince! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ right now! DELL: Introducing the new Dell AI PC . It’s not just an AI computer, it’s a computer built for AI to help do your busywork for you! Get a new Dell AI PC at⁠ https://Dell.com/ai-pc⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mike Carruthers?

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• 1:28Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, what's better, fresh or frozen fish? Turns out to be a bit of a trick question. Then, how do you solve problems before they happen? It can be done if you change your thinking. For instance...

• 1:43Speaker 01

  There was one swing on a playground in Brooklyn that had been responsible for multiple lawsuits. All somebody needed to do was go out and raise this swing six inches, and all of the injuries would have been eliminated, but nobody thought to do that.

• 1:59Mike Carruthers?

  Also, why the secret to cutting back on sweets? Maybe pickles? And you often hear that more is better, but maybe the better solution is less. Subtract something.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Think about subtracting as a way to make things better. One of my favorite quotes, "To gain knowledge, add things every day. To gain wisdom, subtract things every day."

• 2:22Mike Carruthers?

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• 3:46Mike Carruthers?

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• 4:22Mike Carruthers?

  Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. So the other day, we had some people over and we were cooking fish on the grill. And the question came up, what's better, fresh or frozen fish? The answer seems obvious, but I did a little digging. And it's actually kind of a trick question, what's better, fresh or frozen? Because a lot of fresh fish was frozen. The term "fresh fish" doesn't have anything to do with how old the fish is. Fresh fish just means it's not frozen. And if it was never frozen, it may be several days old and may not taste as good as it would've when it was just caught. So to solve this problem, stores often buy frozen fish.

• 5:06Mike Carruthers?

  Ideally, fish that was flash-frozen right after it was caught. Then they thaw it out and sell it. That way, there is less waste because they can defrost only what they expect to sell. If you're buying fish to cook at home, frozen fish may be a better way to go. Particularly if it says on the package it was "flash-frozen." It will taste just as good, if not better, than fresh fish. And it tends to be a lot cheaper. And that is something you should know.

• 5:39Mike Carruthers?

  Imagine if you could solve problems before they happen. Well, the fact is, you do. And the perfect example, I think, is when you change the oil in your car. You take your car in for an oil change, not because there's anything wrong with it. You know that if you don't take it in for an oil change, you're asking for trouble down the road. So you change the oil to prevent the problem before it happens. Yet so much of our life is putting out fires, not preventing them. But what if you could actually solve a lot more problems before they happen in the first place? Well, that's what Dan Heath has been looking into. And he has authored several really interesting books.

• 6:20Mike Carruthers?

  His latest is called "Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen." Hey Dan, welcome.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Hi Mike, thanks for having me on the show.

• 6:30Mike Carruthers?

  You bet. So, explain why you took a look at this and why you think this is important to talk about.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  My interest in this topic goes back to a parable that's pretty well-known in public health circles, but not well outside it. And it's originally attributed to a guy named Irving Zola. And the parable goes like this: You and a friend are having a picnic by the side of a river. And just as you've laid out your picnic blanket, getting ready to eat, you hear a noise from the direction of the river. And you look back and there's a child thrashing around in the water, apparently drowning. And so, of course, both of you instinctively jump in and you fish the child out and you bring them to the shore. And just as your adrenaline is starting to subside a little bit, you hear another shout. And you look back, there's a different child drowning in the river. So, back in you go and you fish that child out. And no sooner have you brought that child to shore, that you look back,

• 7:21Speaker 01

  there are two more kids drowning in the river. And it begins a kind of revolving door of rescue, where you're in and out and fishing kids out. And just as you're starting to grow fatigued from all the rescue work, your friend swims towards shore and steps out, seeming to walk away and leave you alone. And you say, "Hey, where are you going? I need your help. All these kids are drowning. We can't just leave." And your friend says, "Well, I'm going upstream to tackle the guy who's throwing all these kids in the river." In life, whether we're talking about our personal lives, or in our businesses, or even in society, I think that too often we find our attention focus downstream on the reaction, the reaction, the reaction. And we never make our way upstream to try to

• 8:04Speaker 01

  tackle the systems and the forces that are causing the problems in the first place.

• 8:09Mike Carruthers?

  Because that's just how we kind of think. I mean, I don't know if we grow up and learn how to think that way, but you know, you solve problems when they arise. You don't just don't think about doing what you said. And then, also, like, if you're gonna go upstream and fix the problem, well, some of these problems are so complex, some of these systems are, you know, government, or whatever. Where would you even start to solve that?

• 8:38Speaker 01

  It's incredibly complicated to solve problems upstream. I'll give you a simple example. I had a conversation with a deputy police chief about a decade ago. He had this thought experiment where he said, imagine two police officers. And one of those police officers goes downtown where there's a very chaotic intersection. It's a place where cars have collisions a lot of times. And the officer just kind of stations herself visibly in the intersection. And because she's there and drivers see her, they slow down, they get a little bit more cautious, and accidents are prevented. And then he says, imagine a second officer that goes to a different part of downtown where there is a prohibited right turn.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  And she stations herself around the corner. And when people make that illegal right turn, she jumps out and naps them and gives them a ticket. And he says, if you think about these two officers, which one is doing more to protect the public's safety? And he says, indisputably, it's the first one. You know, she's preventing crashes, she might be preventing injuries or deaths. But if you ask a different question, which of these officers gets rewarded? Which of them gets praised? Which of them gets promoted? It's the second officer because she comes back with this stack full of tickets that show what a good job she's done. And meanwhile, that first officer, how does she prove she did anything? You know, you think about, there was a guy commuting downtown that morning who crossed through this intersection.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  And in an alternate reality where the police officer hadn't been there, he would have been in a car crash, possibly fatal. His life was saved by virtue of the officer being there that morning. He'll never know it, nor will the officer ever know that she saved him in particular. And so there's a kind of maddening ambiguity about upstream efforts that I think is interesting. It's like even as you and I could probably say, well, of course, you want to go upstream and keep the kids from being thrown in the river. What I wanted to show in the book was basically two things. Number one, there are lots of obstacles to getting upstream. And number two, despite the presence of those obstacles, we've got to try. Because that's the only recipe for permanently improving systems in our lives, in our work,

• 10:50Speaker 01

  and in our communities.

• 10:52Mike Carruthers?

  Well, but maybe that's happening. I mean, like you say, when you prevent things from happening, you never know they would have happened. So there may be a lot of this going on because we just never see it.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  No question. Yeah, in fact, everywhere you look, there's the evidence of people before us that have had the foresight and the patience to do this for us. You think about the rate of car accidents and fatalities has declined from, oh, boy, I better make sure I'm getting my denominator right. My memory is that, say, 50 years ago was about five deaths per 100 million miles traveled, and today it's down to one. There's been an 80% reduction in fatalities. And you ask, how is that so? I mean, are we all just naturally better drivers today? And the answer is no. I don't think driving ability has improved a lick.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  It's all about the systems that have been designed to try to forestall those problems. It's about safer roads. It's about better lighting. It's about better brake systems. It's about seat belts and airbags. It's about mothers against drunk driving, reducing the incidence of drunk driving on the roads. And we're talking about thousands of people over decades who were all committed to this idea of, what if we put our hands together? What if we put our resources toward preventing bad things from happening? And like the police officer in that story, those people will never know who they helped. They won't know who those thousands of people are, whose lives were saved because of their work. But

• 12:28Speaker 01

  we can see in the data that it happened. And that's the power of upstream thinking.

• 12:34Mike Carruthers?

  Can you bring this down to a more personal level? I mean, we can talk about how police deploy their officers and how that affects policies and all that. But what about on a more personal level?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a fair question. I think the advantage of upstream thinking is it works really on any level. You can think about it at the national level, like with the healthcare example, but you can think about it in your own life. And I'll give you the most trivial example possible from my own life. So I, as you know, I'm a writer, and I tend to write in coffee shops. I don't know why that works for me, some busy, loud coffee shop, but it does. And so I'm used to shuttling my laptop around. Like, I'll go to the coffee shop and write for a while, then I'll come back to my office. And so I'm constantly packing my laptop, unpacking it. I bring a power cord, and I plug it in at the coffee shop, pack it back up, bring it back to my office, plug it in there.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  And after a while, I mean, after years of this behavior, it occurred to me, hey, what if I just bought two power cords? And one of them could live forever in my backpack where I carry around my laptop, and one of them could be just strapped down on my desk so that, you know, when I come back, I can just plug it in and not have to mess with unpacking the power cord. And I'm not telling that story to share my genius with you, because I don't think there was much genius there. But it's almost a clue that, that in our lives, so often we adapt to problems, or we come to take problems for granted that need not exist. You know, that I had just come to accept a reality where I was forever going to have

• 14:16Speaker 01

  this nuisance of power cord shuffling, and yet, the actual amount of labor it took to fix that problem was, I had to go online for five minutes and press, you know, bye. And one of the interesting things to me about this work is, why is that shift in our thinking so difficult? And why do we choose to endure things that we might have prevented?

• 14:38Mike Carruthers?

  Well, human nature, don't you think? Because, I mean, here's the simplest example I can think of. If you want to not get lung cancer, don't smoke. There isn't a smoker alive that knows that their risk of lung cancer is huge compared to a nonsmoker, and yet, they still smoke. So, so there's an example of clear, upstream thinking, stop smoking, prevent cancer, and many people ignore, many people don't, but many people ignore the advice.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  No, it's definitely true. And I think something like smoking is compounded by the addictive nature of the product. But, but I think you're pointing out that there's something universal at play here. And I think that something is tunneling, which is a word I stole from a couple of psychologists who wrote a book called Scarcity. So, let me explain what this is. There was a researcher named Anita Tucker who followed around a bunch of nurses as they went through their day, so she shadowed them for hundreds of hours as part of her dissertation at Harvard. And she found, about what you'd expect, that these nurses were constantly dealing with unexpected problems, like they couldn't get the right medication at the right moment, or they ran out of towels and had to run around and find some somewhere.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  This one morning, Anita Tucker described a situation where there was a nurse who was checking out a new mother, you know, she was ready to take her baby home, and as part of that checkout process, they have to remove the security anklet from the baby's leg. And unfortunately, they couldn't find it, it had fallen off somewhere, so they do this frantic search, and it turns up in the bassinet. And then Anita Tucker says, three hours later, the exact same thing happens with a different mother. The anklet's missing again, they do another frantic search, and this time, they can't find it at all. So the nurse goes to the boss, they figure out an alternate checkout process, and the mothers are dismissed. And so this is what it's like to be a nurse, you're running around, you're trying to figure out novel solutions to problems, you're being resourceful, you know, you don't have to

• 16:41Speaker 01

  run for help every time something goes wrong, you can handle it. And it's kind of an admirable portrait, when I say it that way. But if you look at this from another perspective, what you realize, it's something that's a bit shocking, which is, the system I'm describing here is one that will never improve. It's one that will never get better, because what these nurses have learned to do is work around problems. But they're never going upstream to solve them at the system's level. And back to this word, tunneling, that's essentially what tunneling is. And to be clear, like, the point of this story is not to throw stones at nurses, quite the opposite. My point here is that I think all of us are tunneling in our own professions in the same

• 17:25Speaker 01

  way, that when we're juggling too many things, too many issues, too many problems, we kind of abandon... The idea that we might strategically prioritize them and we just kind of get in the tunnel, if you can picture that in your mind, just being in a tunnel, there's only one direction, there's forward. You hit an obstacle, you try to get it behind you as quickly as you can so you can keep making progress. And the great trap of being in the tunnel is that it's self-perpetuating. You know, what those nurses did is they solved their problems in the moment. You know, they got the mother dismissed, they got a fresh set of towels, but they also doomed themselves to solving exactly the same kind of problems

• 18:05Speaker 01

  the next week and the next month. And so I think this is what we have to overcome, this kind of universal force of tunneling, if we're going to get serious about solving problems.

• 18:15Mike Carruthers?

  A problem, though, I see, is that, and using your example of that guy throwing kids in the river, so we go upstream and tackle him and get him to stop, well, there are a lot of cases where that guy is hard to find, that the cause of the problem is hard to find upstream, and if you can't find it, you can't fix it.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, I know exactly what you mean, that often what we find is, when we start trying to get to the root cause of a problem, it gets really confusing, it gets very complex. I mean, there's a comfort in rescue, because it's very tangible. You see the kid thrashing in the river, you can pull them out, you feel good, you get glory from your friends because you rescued a kid, and then when you start talking about, well, what caused this to begin with, all of a sudden, you've got a debate, you've got a discussion, and it can get very confusing. And that's why, one of the themes that stuck out in my research was, so often, to solve problems, rather than just react to them, required

• 19:21Speaker 01

  a different set of people to come together. Like, one of my favorite stories in the book is about the city of Rockford, which is the second biggest city in Illinois, behind Chicago, and it became the first city in the US to solve the problem of veteran homelessness. And what's fascinating about it, I talked to the former mayor, a guy named Larry Morrissey, and he said, he'd been working on homelessness for nine years. You know, Rockford's one of these places that was an industrial hub, and then all the factories closed, and all the problems that come along with that. And he said, they'd basically gotten nowhere on homelessness in nine years. I mean, they just tread, tread water at best.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  And he said, "They discovered something in the 10th year where in a period of 10 months, they went from nowhere to that first city achievement that I talked about." And so I was asking him how they did this, and he described the following changes. Number one, they stopped treating it as a problem where everybody got to stay in their silos, you know, because there's so many people that have a stake in homelessness, ranging from the homeless people themselves to social services, to the VA, to the police, to homeless shelters, to the fire department. And everybody kind of did their little piece of the puzzle, but they never really collaborated. So the first thing they did was they brought everybody around the same table. And then the second thing was, they didn't just bring them around the table to pontificate,

• 20:44Speaker 01

  you know, to brainstorm about, you know, the origins of homelessness and how to solve it at a societal level. What they did was they oriented people around specific homeless individuals. So their meetings involved what they called a by-name list. They keep a real-time census of every homeless person in the community, and when they meet, they talk about Mike, they talk about Steve, and they say, "Okay, who's seen Steve last?" Well, Steve last, rather. "Well, I saw him under the bridge last week. He's still got his tent under there. He's coming to the shelter a few times a week to get lunch." Okay, who's gonna reach out to them and see if he's ready to be housed? Well, you know, someone raises their hand and says, "We'll do that this week." And that's what the meetings are like.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  They're very concrete, they're very human, and the result of that is you come to understand all the moving parts in the system so much better because you see them through the lens of these real individual cases. And that taught me something powerful, that what feels like macro change often starts with micro-understanding, that you can't help thousands of people or millions until you can help one. And I think that's part of the antidote here, is learning how to change the way we collaborate and learning how to get closer to the systems that yield the problems.

• 22:06Mike Carruthers?

  Dan Heath is my guest. He is a writer and researcher, and he's author of the book Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen. This episode is sponsored by Vinted. You know, I remember interviewing an organizing expert who offered this really clever trick for figuring out which clothes you should get rid of. You go to your closet and you look at the clothes hanging there. And chances are, the ones toward the middle are the clothes you wear most often. But the clothes pushed way over to the left or the right, some of those you probably haven't worn in years, and yet there they hang, taking up space. But here's the thing, you could turn those clothes into money.

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  With no seller fees, you keep every dollar you earn. That's Vinted, V-I-N-T-E-D. If you listen to something you should know regularly, you know we talk about sleep quite a bit here. And one of the things I've learned from those conversations is just how important a good night's sleep is. And I've always been someone who loves his sleep. So I was intrigued when I heard about Beam Dream. It's a delicious nighttime drink formulated to help you fall asleep faster, stay asleep, and wake up refreshed. It contains ingredients like reishi, magnesium, L-theanine, epigenin, and melatonin.

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  discount, that means you'll pay just 83 cents per night for the best sleep of your life. So seriously, think about it. I mean, how much would you pay for a truly great night of sleep? Beam is just 83 cents per night. So go to shopbeam.com/sysk now. That's shopbeam.com/sysk. So Dan, I think one of the problems in trying to identify those upstream problems is that we live in an era of specialization. You know, in the factory, one person does one job, is not necessarily aware of what everyone else does or how they do it. They just know

• 25:40Mike Carruthers?

  that to do their one job. So they don't see the big picture enough to know how to tackle the big picture as a whole.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Exactly right. And what we're fighting there is, I mean, most organizations are designed with great care and intention to divide people up and to force them to specialize within silos. And it's not that there's some evil intent there. That's the source of great efficiencies. You know, you have the one guy on the assembly line whose job it is to screw in the widgets, and by God, with a lot of practice, he gets very efficient at screwing in the widgets. But that very same structure is also the deterrent to solving bigger problems than exist at any one level of that kind of fragmented infrastructure. Like, just to be more tangible about this, there's a story about Expedia, which, you

• 26:33Speaker 01

  know, is the online travel site where you can book hotels or airfare, whatever. They had a problem back in 2012 where of every hundred customers who booked a reservation on the site, 58 of them ended up calling the call center for support, which is just kind of mind boggling, right? Because the whole point of an online travel site is that you can do it yourself. And yet, almost 60% of the people who did it themselves ended up needing help. So this guy named Ryan O'Neal starts digging into this to figure out what in the world is going on. And he figures out the number one reason that people are calling is to get a copy of their itinerary. Right? That's it. To get a copy of their itinerary. 20 million calls were placed in 2012.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  That's like every single person in Florida calling Expedia in one year to request a copy of their itinerary. And so if you ask, "How do you solve that problem?", it doesn't take a genius, right? Well, they added a branch to the IVR, "Press 2 if you're calling for a copy of your itinerary", they allowed people to self-serve online, they changed the way that they sent out the confirmation so that they wouldn't end up in spam, which was part of the problem. The solutions were easy. The more interesting thing to me is, how does a problem like that boil up to that point? You know, why wasn't there a kind of red flag triggered when you got your 7 millionth call for an itinerary?

• 27:59Speaker 01

  And the answer is, is back to that idea of fragmentation, where at Expedia, like virtually every other business, you have these distinct groups of people with different goals. The marketing team's goal is to attract people to Expedia, and then you've got a product team whose job it is to design such a smooth, easy interface that they get to the point of booking and transaction. And then you've got the IT team, whose job it is to keep everything humming and keep uptime as high as possible. And then you've got the call center, and their job is to resolve people's issues quickly and keep people happy. And on an individual basis, all those goals make perfect sense. They sound logical.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  But then when you ask a very basic question like, "Whose job in this ecosystem is it to make sure that customers don't need to call us for help?", the answer is, "Nobody." It's nobody's job. And in fact, it's even worse than that. Like, there's no one in this whole system who would even be rewarded if that happened.

• 29:00Mike Carruthers?

  It just seems, as I said before, that even when you decide to tackle a problem upstream... Doesn't mean you'll always find the problem upstream and you may find something else. You may say this is the solution and in fact it's not.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Well, this is another layer of the upstream challenge is thinking in systems and realizing that when we intervene in systems, they're likely to have unintended consequences. Like, there was an example in New York City where a Google engineer, a young guy, was walking through Central Park and a branch from an oak tree fell down and hit him on the head and caused brain injuries and paralysis. And it was just a horrible tragedy and it seems like one of those freak things that just happen. And then later, the controller of New York City, a guy named Scott Stringer, he started analyzing the claims that had been paid out by the city to settle lawsuits.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  So this engineer I talked about had settled a claim for $11 million from his injuries. What Stringer discovered was there were actually a bunch of settlements from falling branches. And so Stringer was thinking, well, what in the world? And he began to dig around, come to find out that the city's pruning budget had been cut in previous years in an effort to save money. And so here you've got, you know, an interesting side effect, right? From within the silo of the Parks Department, what's the presenting problem? The problem is, we've got to cut our budget. They think, okay, we've got too much money in the pruning budget, we can cut back there. From their perspective, within that part of the system, it all looked good. They did save the money.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  But then what they weren't seeing was that the side effect of that was, they're not pruning these old dead branches, the dead branches are falling, they're hurting people. And as one of Scott Stringer's colleagues said, whatever money we thought we were saving on the maintenance side, we were just paying right out on the lawsuit side. So Stringer's office starts mapping out...

• 31:07Speaker 01

  The nature of these claims that they're paying, they created a program called Claimstat, where they mapped and indexed the tens of thousands of annual claims made against the city, and they start finding these just remarkable patterns. They found there was one swing on a playground in Brooklyn that had been responsible for multiple lawsuits. All somebody needed to do was go out and raise this swing six inches, and all of the injuries would have been eliminated, but nobody thought to do that. Nobody could see it. And so that's part of the challenge is when we get involved in these complex systems, we can't just focus on the part. We can't just obsess on the fact that, okay, parks

• 31:50Speaker 01

  needs to save money, we'll cut money from within parks. We've got to ask ourselves, what is the effect of cutting this thing within the park's budget, and are we paying attention to the side consequences?

• 32:00Mike Carruthers?

  Well, what I really like about this is it makes you think differently. It makes you look at problems differently. It makes you look upstream, instead of just focusing on the symptom of the problem right here and now, which can open up all kinds of possibilities. Dan Heath has been my guest. The book is called Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen, and there is a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you, Dan.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Thanks so much, Mike.

• 32:29Speaker 03

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• 33:17Mike Carruthers?

  When there's a problem, often the solution is to add something. You need to decorate a room, you add some furniture. You need a garden, you plant some plants. If you're sick, you want the doctor to give you more medicine. Our minds tend to want to add things to make things better, or to fix a problem, which in many cases is just fine. But in some cases, less might be better. For example, we come up with a lot of new rules at work, when in fact it might be better to get rid of some of the old ones. Probably the best example I can think of of when subtracting is best, is editing. When you're editing a term paper, or a video, or a podcast.

• 34:01Mike Carruthers?

  The process of editing, which is subtracting things, makes it better. Adding something is often the default solution, when in fact subtracting can be an excellent, but often overlooked way to go. This is according to Leidy Klotz. He's a scientist who studies and writes about design and problem solving. He's a professor of engineering and architecture at the University of Virginia, and author of the book, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less. Hi, Leidy, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Hi, Mike. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 34:37Mike Carruthers?

  So when I hear words like less and subtract, I think, oh, here comes one of those minimalist guys who's going to tell me to get rid of all my furniture, and except the chair in the corner, and you know, throw away all my forks, except the four I need. But that's not what your message necessarily is. So what is it?

• 34:57Speaker 02

  It's to think about subtracting as a way to make things better. And you know, if we think about any situation that we encounter, this happens all the time, whether it's, you know, you mentioned the minimalist ideas that often has to do with the physical things in our house. We ask, how do we make our living space better? It's like, well, I could add this blanket, or whatever. Whenever we're at, whenever we ask that question, we have multiple options. One is to add things, one is to kind of rearrange things. And one that we overlook is that we can actually take things away. One of my favorite quotes, to gain knowledge, add things every day. To gain wisdom, subtract things every day.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  And this is like, that quote still gets thrown around the internet. And it's, it's evidence that we've been overlooking subtracting for a long time. And that we still overlook it because that kind of quote rings true and counterintuitive still.

• 35:57Mike Carruthers?

  So subtracting rather than adding, is that just not human nature? When we have a problem, we look to add something and that's what we do?

• 36:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what our research found. I mean, so I, I've been interested in this for a really long time as a designer, engineer, you know, architect, professor. I, you know, kind of noticed these instances where taking something away actually creates something better, whether it's editing words, right? If you write 200 words and you're challenged to narrow it down to 100, that'll be a better 100 words. Or it's, you know, these streamlined, elegant, modern designs that that looks better. And so the question was, do we actually overlook that? And the answer is, is yes.

• 36:43Mike Carruthers?

  So let's talk about some real life examples of what you mean by subtracting and how that makes it better.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  The best example is, I mean, I was playing Legos with my three-year-old son. And this was before we had done the research. What we were doing was building a bridge, basically. And the problem we had was that the Lego bridge wasn't level. So there was one column on the bridge that was shorter than the other column. And so I went to solve this problem to improve the situation. I turned around behind me to grab a block to add to the shorter column. By the time I had turned back around, my son had removed a block from the longer column. And so, you know, what's cool about that example is that, I mean, we didn't know it at the time, but the thought process that I went through was pretty close to what we think, you know, is the, the normal process that most people would go through in trying

• 37:36Speaker 02

  to improve a situation, which is to think, what can I add to it? And then if my son hadn't been there, I would have just added the block. And created the level bridge and moved on without even asking whether subtracting was a better option.

• 37:51Mike Carruthers?

  Well, but subtracting, was it a better option or it was just an option?

• 37:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. In that case, it was just an option. I mean, you could make an argument that my son's solution was easier and required less resources. But, you know, this is why we needed to do research, right? We needed to figure out, do people overlook this even when it's to their detriment, even when it's the better option?

• 38:15Mike Carruthers?

  So that Lego example and your son, that's a great example, but that's a physical example of building things. Let's move into the world of, say, ideas and, and how this plays out with ideas and, and an example might help.

• 38:32Speaker 02

  One of our studies was a study of real life. Our university's strategic improvement plan asked for, hey, what are ways that we can improve the university? And we looked at that data and only 8% of the suggestions were to take something away. So overwhelmingly additive suggestions, which, again, this suggests that options are being left on the table, right? The people aren't fully exploring the range of solutions that could make this university a better place.

• 39:10Mike Carruthers?

  But it seems that in many cases, it's so subjective. I mean, adding might work, subtracting might work, as in the case of your Lego example with your son. He subtracted you were going to add, but one wasn't necessarily better than the other. They were just different ways of approaching the same problem.

• 39:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I'm so glad you brought that up. And if, if somebody likes adding, by all means add. I mean, this is, this is not us trying to say subtracting is always better. It's that, you know, we systematically don't think of it and then we're, we're missing out on options. But I do think that it, well, I know that it's helpful to remember to consider subtracting. When, when people were reminded. That, hey, you can add or subtract here. Just a simple reminder that increased rates of taking away. Which you'd say, well, big deal, uh, because shouldn't a reminder increase rates of anything? But the rate that that reminder didn't increase rates of adding.

• 40:10Speaker 02

  So when we, when we're reminded to add, we can add or subtract, we subtract more. So that's again, evidence that we're systematically overlooking it. But also, you know, something we can put into practice immediately, which is, hey, these are important decisions I have to make in my life. You know, cleaning your desk, you probably don't need a reminder. But when it's doing your weekly to do list, maybe you need to remind yourself to also consider some stop doings, right? Or some stop, stop, things that you want to take off of your weekly to do list. Yeah, that's, uh, you know, a little bit of the, the science, but it also, you know, has very real implications for how we live our lives.

• 40:51Mike Carruthers?

  Well, as, as you've been talking, it got me to thinking because, you know, using again, the Lego example with your son, he chose to take away one little Lego block to fix the problem. And as you were pointing out, on a to do list, maybe you need to take some things off your to do list. But it occurred to me, and I want to get you to comment on this. When we talk about Lego bricks and, and taking things off your to do list, these are small moves. These are taking little pieces of something and subtracting them. And maybe we need a more fundamental subtraction. Maybe you don't need a to do list. Maybe you need to subtract the whole to do list and get a calendar or something.

• 41:35Mike Carruthers?

  Or, for example, science used to believe that everything revolved around the earth. And that was the premise. And then everything was added on top of that. But if you at some point weren't, weren't willing to let go of that concept, you keep trying to add on top of it, you're adding on to a foundation that is going to crumble. So it, even more important that you learn to take away and say, well, let's question that before we move on.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  Right, and it's it's very analogous to how we do it in the physical world, right? And so the the physical example that I like is um balance bikes. And these are the the bikes that kids two and younger can ride a balance bike. And this bike is small for that age group, but it also has the pedals removed, which is the subtractive innovation. And um and then the kids can stride on top of the bike. And then the surprising thing is that they can actually balance. Um, so it's a great, great invention. But the same thing that was happening with the solar system on a on a smaller scale, to be able to come up with this invention, you had to let go of the idea that the the drivetrain is a fundamental part of the bike.

• 42:50Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I like that example because it it illustrates your point so well that if if you're going to create a bicycle for little kids, well, it's a bicycle. So one of the first things you're going to put on your bicycle for little kids are pedals. But if you can get your mind to think, well, wait, maybe we don't need pedals. Let's subtract the pedals. And it turns out, and it turns out you really got something. So so where else can we can we use this concept of subtracting?

• 43:22Speaker 02

  One great example is spending money to save time. Um, it's analogous to the to do list and the stop doing list. But basically what you're doing is is taking something off of your calendar and you're actually paying for the subtraction. But uh, but research shows that that can actually make us happier, right? Spending money to save time. So that's a subtraction that can make our lives immediately better. And then the the cleaning one, you mentioned the desk. And I know like, okay, cleaning up your desk. I think that the cleaning illustrates that the more the more you take away, the more noticeable it becomes, whether it's a really tightly edited podcast

• 44:03Speaker 02

  or a super clean desk or, you know, a really streamlined, modern design. There are these examples of subtraction where it is noticeable that somebody put in the effort to take away.

• 44:16Mike Carruthers?

  What about, though, maybe I'm nitpicking here, but?

• 44:20Speaker 02

  No, no, the nitpicking is good. I think, yeah.

• 44:23Mike Carruthers?

  So somebody could say, well, kids, you know, I heard this podcast and Lighty said, you know, we should subtract. So we're not going on vacation this year. We're subtracting vacations. And everyone's upset about that, but we're doing, we're following your advice.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not saying subtract. I'm saying think add or add and subtract, right? One of the reasons that we don't think about subtracting is because we position these things as opposites, right? It's either add or subtract. And really what they, we should think of them as is complementary approaches to making change, right? So you're, you're thinking about, okay, how do we improve our family life? Uh, one way is to add a vacation, one way is to subtract a vacation. Now you've thought about both of them and you know, they're, they're complementary approaches to change. That's great. You, you brought both of them to mind and you can go about making the best decision for you. I think the, the root of that question, like why do you said we should subtract?

• 45:23Speaker 02

  Uh, or this like, just because we don't think of subtracting, we should always subtract. I think that often comes from a place of positioning these things as opposite each other instead of complementary. And if they're complementary, then we, we go a long way towards overcoming the fundamental problem here, which is that we don't even think of subtracting.

• 45:45Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, well, I think that's the big takeaway from this, or at least from this conversation is, like you said, when you remind people that you can either add or subtract, you get more subtraction, you don't get more addition, that people just don't think about it. But when you think about it, well, sometimes it's like a light bulb going off.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. And if it's not a light bulb going off, then you don't have to follow through with it. I mean, but I think, you know, how can we capture all these, this really low hanging fruit? These cases where it's just so obviously, so much, so obviously better when you think of it.

• 46:20Mike Carruthers?

  But do you think this, this desire for addition is human nature or is it a cultural thing? We just learn that.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  Any behavior has multiple reasons for it, but this definitely goes beyond cultural, um, based on our, based on our research and based on, you know, kind of how it's working in our brains, um, where, uh, I mean, we did in some of our experiments, for example, tested people in Japan and Germany, and our goal wasn't to do a cross-cultural comparison, so they weren't.

• 46:56Speaker 02

  You know, this isn't conclusive that it's exactly the same across cultures, but there was more variation within those cultures than there was between the cultures. So what we found in those other cultures was quite consistent. And there's a lot of just really good biological reasons why we might do this. I mean, so there's the competence issue, right? Where we want to display competence, that's a biological instinct. There's also just acquiring things, namely food, has been really good for passing down genes, right? That that helped, that an instinct to acquire in that case, helps you make it through the, if you do that during good times,

• 47:39Speaker 02

  it helps you, makes you more likely to make it through the lean times and pass genes down across generations. So there's that biological reasons. I also think there's some just real cultural reasons, but the cultural reasons extend beyond, they cross all the cultures that are around now, or nearly all of the cultures that are around now. In that, as we're developing civilization, it made a lot of sense to add in most cases, right? If there's no highway, it makes sense to add a road to connect the places. But now that, you know, there's so many highways that some are bisecting cities, now that subtracting highways becomes a more viable option, or at least it's on the table now.

• 48:22Speaker 02

  And so through the history of civilization, adding has been often the better way to make things better. The same with knowledge, right? The less knowledge you have, the more likely the additions are helpful. The more knowledge you have, the more kind of opportunities there are to reflect on the information that you already have. And then the other cultural thing is we just walk around in this world where adding is all around us, right? So, and even if somebody subtracts something, you may notice it the first day, but after a year or two years. There's not this reminder that subtracting is to think and you know, we get our cues from the world that we live in.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  So it creates this reinforcing cycle where you're less likely to think of subtracting. You're less likely to encounter subtraction, which makes you even less likely to think of it. And that reinforces itself. So I think it's a, to back to your question, I think, yes, there's a cultural element to it. Yes, there's a biological element to it and these, these forces reinforce each other.

• 49:25Mike Carruthers?

  Well, and we have floating in our heads, you know, those two sayings, more is better, but also less is more. So more is better when you think of things like money, food, those kinds of things. I mean, like you were saying that more is better, but everybody has that, some understanding of that phrase, less is more, that, that too much is not always good. And those things do kind of compete in our heads of, you know, is it less or is it more?

• 49:57Speaker 02

  More is better is almost, I mean, that doesn't even need to be said, right? That's just kind of life. And I think the less is more in those phrases that become so catchy, they're, they're, they've endured for a really long time. And the reason we need them, I think, is because they're effectively reminders, right? They work like the reminders worked in our experiment to say, hey, look, sometimes this might work.

• 50:21Mike Carruthers?

  Well, it certainly makes you think. And I guess what it makes you think is that there are often other options where we are often adding things to fix a problem. Maybe we have options of subtracting something that could fix the problem just as well, if not even better. I've been talking with Lighty Klotz, who studies and writes about design and problem solving. He is a professor of engineering and architecture at the University of Virginia. And the name of his book is Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less. And you'll find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Lighty. Appreciate you being here.

• 50:58Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Mike.

• 51:03Mike Carruthers?

  I know a lot of people are trying to cut back on sugar and sweets. And if you're one of them, you might want to stock up on pickles. Pickles can do wonders at curbing cravings, especially if you've got a craving for something sweet. Pickles are crunchy, sour, pungent, and spicy all at once, and they overwhelm the senses. In an experiment, hungry participants were practically drooling over some delicious desserts that they would soon be eating. But first, they had to eat a pickle. In most cases, the urge to eat the sweets was gone in as little as 10 seconds.

• 51:42Mike Carruthers?

  Those who insisted on dessert say they ate less of it than they would have if they hadn't eaten the pickle. And that is something you should know. You know, out here in podcast land, it's dog-eat-dog. There's millions of podcasts to choose from, and often what people need is a recommendation. So please, recommend this podcast to someone you know. I'm Micah Rutherford. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

• 52:11Speaker 03

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• 52:37Speaker 04

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• 52:49Speaker 05

  Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.