We’ve been making a lot of updates to the 42courses website lately, and although we’re forever adding new things, we also make time to check whether everything still makes sense. When it doesn’t, we take it out. Removing things on purpose has a name: via negativa, which is Latin for “the negative way”. In plain English, it means improving something by subtracting rather than adding. Nassim Taleb built half of Antifragile on it, arguing that we know far more about what is wrong than about what is right, so removing the wrong thing is a surer bet than adding a supposedly right one. It is also the option almost nobody reaches for. Across eight experiments published in Nature in 2021, researchers at the University of Virginia found that people systematically default to adding when asked to improve something, and overlook subtracting entirely, even when subtracting is cheaper, faster and demonstrably better. Not rejected after consideration. Simply never considered. Which brings us to a Dutch traffic engineer called Hans Monderman. In the late nineties Monderman was handed the Laweiplein, a four-way junction in the centre of the town of Drachten carrying something like 22,000 vehicles a day, plus cyclists, plus pedestrians, plus a steady supply of accidents. The conventional fix was more equipment: better signals, clearer signage, extra railings, another arrow painted on the tarmac. Monderman decided the equipment was the problem. So he removed it. The traffic lights went. The signs went. The lane markings, the priority arrows and the pedestrian barriers went with them. What replaced them was not another instruction but the absence of one: an open square with a raised circle of grass in the middle, some fountains, and almost nothing telling anybody what to do. Reported accidents at the junction fell from 36 in the four years before the change to two in the two years after it. Traffic jams, which had been routine, largely stopped. His explanation was about attention rather than engineering. A driver given precise instructions follows the instructions and stops looking at anything else, including the human beings. Strip the certainty out and the driver has no choice but to look up, slow down and negotiate with whoever else is there. “We’re losing our capacity for socially responsible behaviour. The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people’s sense of personal responsibility dwindles.” Hans Monderman, Der Spiegel, 16 November 2006 London ran its own version on Kensington High Street, pulling out around 600 metres of pedestrian guard railings from 2003. Injuries to pedestrians fell from 26 a year to nine. The approach, known as shared space, is not without serious critics, particularly organisations representing blind and partially sighted people, for whom removing kerbs and barriers removes vital information too. It is a real objection and worth knowing about. But the underlying observation holds: a lot of what we install to fix a problem turns out to be feeding it. Now look at your own organisation, because your office is full of traffic lights. The weekly status meeting nobody can remember commissioning. The approval step added after one incident in 2019 that everybody now quietly routes around. The quarterly report nobody reads. The tool you bought to solve a problem you no longer have, still costing you a seat licence per person per month. None of it arrived through incompetence. It was probably all a good idea once, and then nobody was ever given the job of taking it out again. Every process in your company had a champion who argued for it, wrote the business case and got the credit when it launched. Almost none of them have anybody whose job it is to argue for their removal. Additions have sponsors. Removals have nobody, so they accumulate, and the organisation gets heavier every year while everybody works harder to move it. Elon Musk’s answer to this is blunter than most companies could get away with. In an email to Tesla staff in April 2018, he told people to walk out of any meeting the moment they stopped adding value: “It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.” Whether or not you could implement that yourself, it is worth sitting with the thought experiment. Picture a room where anybody could leave whenever they liked. You would think a great deal harder about who you invited, and how long you kept them. If you work in marketing, advertising or any creative discipline, none of this should feel new, even if you have never had a name for it. Good creative work is nearly always a process of reduction: the fourth idea dropped, the sentence deleted, the shot that didn’t make the final cut. The campaigns that work say one thing. The ones that fail are usually the ones where three stakeholders each got their message in. The cheering part is what this means for your budget. You do not need more money, another tool or an extra head to make next quarter better than this one. There is almost certainly something already on your list that could go, and getting rid of it hands time back to everybody who touches it, immediately and at no cost. How to use it at work Ask the unlocking question. “What are we doing that nobody would start today?” Give a team ten minutes with that question and you will have a marvellous list. The ideas are already there. Nobody has been asked for them. Shrink the invite list. Before you send the next group meeting invite, take two names off it. If they would genuinely have contributed, they will tell you. Give new processes a review date. Not an execution date, a diary note: in six months, does this still earn its place? It turns removal into routine housekeeping rather than an argument somebody has to win. Make removals count. Put what your team killed in the update alongside what it shipped. Watch how quickly the incentive changes once stopping things is something you get credit for. Want to go deeper Finding the real problem before you start bolting solutions onto it is the whole of our Problem Solving course, taught with a former Scotland Yard detective. And The Circular Economy is via negativa at industrial scale: how to do considerably more with considerably less.