As a pilot I was taught to aviate, navigate and then communicate. When the cognitive load increased we used “load shedding” to stop communicating and, if necessary, stop navigating - because a failure in aviating is often fatal. This should be an intuitive process, but it is better as a deliberate strategy.
I have been teaching in higher ed for more than 20 years. Over time, large lecture introductory courses like mine typically become bloated, as we add the latest and greatest technologies and assessment tools to the course.
Having read Subtract (which is, along with Range, a Top 5 book for me in the past 5-7 years), I committed to improving the course and my teaching by including fewer, not more, course elements. My course now only includes design elements that enhance students' chances of success, mainly targeting (1) showing up for in-person class and (2) doing something, literally ANYTHING, outside of class.
I accomplish #1 via the use an audience response system that incentivizes attendance and participation and I accomplish #2 via the use of online adaptive quiz assignments from the publisher of the textbook, which are open-book, open-note, and untimed. Gone are assignments and activities that don't help me achieve either of those two goals.
My students enjoy the course, their grades are solid, and everything is much less complicated, for them and for me. Oh, and I teach up to 1,000 students total in my two courses. Indeed, subtracting is the answer and less is more...
I love this article and appreciate these short ones - they really pack a punch. I remember this resonated me when I read the quote "It's the empty space that makes the room useful." Thanks, David!
I love the NFL, but I have three small children which makes time for games short. Instead of watching a three hour game, I watch the condensed game on NFL Plus (all plays for the game, just downtime taken out), and it only lasts 40 minutes. It allows me to subtract meaningless downtime while allowing myself to enjoy the game the next morning and still spend time with my kids all day Sunday. Win win.
A friend of mine bought an old house and his furnace was not working properly, it would cut out and cut in at strange times and would often act erratically. He asked a co-worker who used to be in the home heating business to come take a look. After much cursing and screaming, the coworker came out and showed him a rat's nest of transformers, resistors, inductors, switches, and various other circuit elements that he had stripped out. It seems that every time someone at the house called in a service technician, they ended up adding a new chunk of circuitry meant to correct whatever it was that the home owner was complaining about. The amount of circuits added on to the control circuit created such a loading problem that the unintended consequence was the kind of misoperation that my friend was experiencing. Apparently this was common practice, it was a quick and easy workaround and happened a lot. Our co-worker cleaned away the detritus and my friend didn't have any other problems afterwards.
I noticed that when I was bored in the afternoons, instead of practicing French or reading my book, or really anything slightly productive, I would sit and watch YouTube on my phone. In particular, I found the YouTube shorts to be addictive. So, I took the YouTube app off my phone and now I get more stuff done!
If you're focused on 9 or 10 things, you're really focused on nothing.
A quote on minimalism that I think harmonizes with this idea well.
"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add but when there is nothing left to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness" - Antone de Saint-Exupery.
In wartime it is easy to imagine a scenario where a pilot would be required to maneuver an aircraft to employ countermeasures to avoid a missile or other ground fire. In that situation, where you are going at the moment (navigating) is not really important, provided that you are avoiding the ground and the threat (aviating). In peacetime we could encounter a situation where some distraction or upset has resulted in the aircraft getting into an unusual attitude (excessive bank or descent angles). When this happens, it is critical that the pilot regain control and establish stable flight, preferably climbing, without regard for exactly where they might be going. In-flight emergencies (bird strikes, fires and engine failures) are also good times to just fly the plane. In all of these cases, once controlled flight is regained, it is time to restart navigating and then communicating. Of course, once you start communicating, how you tell that story is up to you, but in today's electronic airplanes there is little room for excessive creativity.
As i read your post, I found myself thinking back to my first year in grad school, in 1971. We had to read Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and I've never forgotten the book. It's essentially about how scientific theories start out nice and simple but over time get bogged down in the extra "stuff" needed to explain things that don't fit the theory. Eventually, the theory in effect dies under its own weight, and a newer and simpler theory emerges. Think the theory that the world is flat...
I'm glad to see that Klotz's Subtract mentions the Kuhn book. The ideas sound similar, and there are examples of the Christmas tree effect everywhere.
I work as a pharmacy technician at a large company. If you want to guess.. (The name is only 3 letters long)....our work load has become increasingly difficult to manage. From corporate adding more & more tasks that they demand we do. Your story of the Army adding more and more to the armor to where it out weighed the smaller soldiers really is a great comparison for my job. And im sure many people in many occupations can relate. Its just sad that we have no voice for the highest on the totem poles to hear us.
“Knowledge is the orderly loss of information.” -- Kenneth Boulding
This was delivered during a department seminar that I attended several decades ago. Have never found it in print. A Boulding presentation had so many keen observations and perspectives to share but it was this one that stuck with me from a 45 minute fusillade. I wish I still had my notes from that session.
Thanks to Annie Duke for pointing me in your direction, David! Just finished Range. 💯 (Let’s talk about the mathematical concept of generality? Analogy.)
I too read Subtract, which led me to correspond with Leidy Klotz about the subtraction technique I produced while working for an international medical devices company 🩹.
Like all companies in our industry, we had reams and reams of processes, procedures, forms, checklists,... to ensure our products’ safety and efficacy. With all that compliance overhead, for a period, we were still delivering products with an unacceptable level of defects. (Think recalls and the like.) My manager put a halt on product updates until we could develop an oversight process (sounds like addition) to ensure lower/no defects. In short, I conceived of a process where every change and any subsequent defect discovered would undergo and “impact assessment” whereby the potential impact to safety, efficacy, user experience, reliability, and a couple other quality principles could be qualitatively assessed/(in)validated. (This is similar to the qualitative assessment adopted by NASA post shuttle accidents highlighted in Range.) The upshot: the reams of processes/procedures were still there to satisfy regulatory compliance, but the impact assessments, done by a more engaged/psychologically safe team, eliminated/significantly reduced product defects. It was almost as if all the previous processes/procedures could have been subtracted and replaced by a much simpler (in)validation process. In the end, we verified (much) less and validated more.
Btw, in an over 30-years career, I was outsider of sorts to product quality. But, I did publish a 2019 paper on medical device software impact assessments in American Society for Quality’s (ASQ) Software Quality Journal. Look me up on LinkedIn for an e-copy there.
As a pilot I was taught to aviate, navigate and then communicate. When the cognitive load increased we used “load shedding” to stop communicating and, if necessary, stop navigating - because a failure in aviating is often fatal. This should be an intuitive process, but it is better as a deliberate strategy.
I have been teaching in higher ed for more than 20 years. Over time, large lecture introductory courses like mine typically become bloated, as we add the latest and greatest technologies and assessment tools to the course.
Having read Subtract (which is, along with Range, a Top 5 book for me in the past 5-7 years), I committed to improving the course and my teaching by including fewer, not more, course elements. My course now only includes design elements that enhance students' chances of success, mainly targeting (1) showing up for in-person class and (2) doing something, literally ANYTHING, outside of class.
I accomplish #1 via the use an audience response system that incentivizes attendance and participation and I accomplish #2 via the use of online adaptive quiz assignments from the publisher of the textbook, which are open-book, open-note, and untimed. Gone are assignments and activities that don't help me achieve either of those two goals.
My students enjoy the course, their grades are solid, and everything is much less complicated, for them and for me. Oh, and I teach up to 1,000 students total in my two courses. Indeed, subtracting is the answer and less is more...
Spot on! And timeless advice. "To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day." --Lao Tzu
I’m intrigued by the book recommendation. Are you planning an interview soon, or do I have time to read it and come up with some smart questions?
I love this article and appreciate these short ones - they really pack a punch. I remember this resonated me when I read the quote "It's the empty space that makes the room useful." Thanks, David!
I love the NFL, but I have three small children which makes time for games short. Instead of watching a three hour game, I watch the condensed game on NFL Plus (all plays for the game, just downtime taken out), and it only lasts 40 minutes. It allows me to subtract meaningless downtime while allowing myself to enjoy the game the next morning and still spend time with my kids all day Sunday. Win win.
A friend of mine bought an old house and his furnace was not working properly, it would cut out and cut in at strange times and would often act erratically. He asked a co-worker who used to be in the home heating business to come take a look. After much cursing and screaming, the coworker came out and showed him a rat's nest of transformers, resistors, inductors, switches, and various other circuit elements that he had stripped out. It seems that every time someone at the house called in a service technician, they ended up adding a new chunk of circuitry meant to correct whatever it was that the home owner was complaining about. The amount of circuits added on to the control circuit created such a loading problem that the unintended consequence was the kind of misoperation that my friend was experiencing. Apparently this was common practice, it was a quick and easy workaround and happened a lot. Our co-worker cleaned away the detritus and my friend didn't have any other problems afterwards.
I noticed that when I was bored in the afternoons, instead of practicing French or reading my book, or really anything slightly productive, I would sit and watch YouTube on my phone. In particular, I found the YouTube shorts to be addictive. So, I took the YouTube app off my phone and now I get more stuff done!
If you're focused on 9 or 10 things, you're really focused on nothing.
A quote on minimalism that I think harmonizes with this idea well.
"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add but when there is nothing left to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness" - Antone de Saint-Exupery.
In wartime it is easy to imagine a scenario where a pilot would be required to maneuver an aircraft to employ countermeasures to avoid a missile or other ground fire. In that situation, where you are going at the moment (navigating) is not really important, provided that you are avoiding the ground and the threat (aviating). In peacetime we could encounter a situation where some distraction or upset has resulted in the aircraft getting into an unusual attitude (excessive bank or descent angles). When this happens, it is critical that the pilot regain control and establish stable flight, preferably climbing, without regard for exactly where they might be going. In-flight emergencies (bird strikes, fires and engine failures) are also good times to just fly the plane. In all of these cases, once controlled flight is regained, it is time to restart navigating and then communicating. Of course, once you start communicating, how you tell that story is up to you, but in today's electronic airplanes there is little room for excessive creativity.
As i read your post, I found myself thinking back to my first year in grad school, in 1971. We had to read Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and I've never forgotten the book. It's essentially about how scientific theories start out nice and simple but over time get bogged down in the extra "stuff" needed to explain things that don't fit the theory. Eventually, the theory in effect dies under its own weight, and a newer and simpler theory emerges. Think the theory that the world is flat...
I'm glad to see that Klotz's Subtract mentions the Kuhn book. The ideas sound similar, and there are examples of the Christmas tree effect everywhere.
How come you didn't say "more is less"?
I work as a pharmacy technician at a large company. If you want to guess.. (The name is only 3 letters long)....our work load has become increasingly difficult to manage. From corporate adding more & more tasks that they demand we do. Your story of the Army adding more and more to the armor to where it out weighed the smaller soldiers really is a great comparison for my job. And im sure many people in many occupations can relate. Its just sad that we have no voice for the highest on the totem poles to hear us.
Reminds me of a quote most often attributed to Coco Chanel…
‘Before you leave your house take a good look at yourself in the mirror and remove one piece of jewelry. You’ll look smarter.’
“Knowledge is the orderly loss of information.” -- Kenneth Boulding
This was delivered during a department seminar that I attended several decades ago. Have never found it in print. A Boulding presentation had so many keen observations and perspectives to share but it was this one that stuck with me from a 45 minute fusillade. I wish I still had my notes from that session.
Thanks to Annie Duke for pointing me in your direction, David! Just finished Range. 💯 (Let’s talk about the mathematical concept of generality? Analogy.)
I too read Subtract, which led me to correspond with Leidy Klotz about the subtraction technique I produced while working for an international medical devices company 🩹.
Like all companies in our industry, we had reams and reams of processes, procedures, forms, checklists,... to ensure our products’ safety and efficacy. With all that compliance overhead, for a period, we were still delivering products with an unacceptable level of defects. (Think recalls and the like.) My manager put a halt on product updates until we could develop an oversight process (sounds like addition) to ensure lower/no defects. In short, I conceived of a process where every change and any subsequent defect discovered would undergo and “impact assessment” whereby the potential impact to safety, efficacy, user experience, reliability, and a couple other quality principles could be qualitatively assessed/(in)validated. (This is similar to the qualitative assessment adopted by NASA post shuttle accidents highlighted in Range.) The upshot: the reams of processes/procedures were still there to satisfy regulatory compliance, but the impact assessments, done by a more engaged/psychologically safe team, eliminated/significantly reduced product defects. It was almost as if all the previous processes/procedures could have been subtracted and replaced by a much simpler (in)validation process. In the end, we verified (much) less and validated more.
Btw, in an over 30-years career, I was outsider of sorts to product quality. But, I did publish a 2019 paper on medical device software impact assessments in American Society for Quality’s (ASQ) Software Quality Journal. Look me up on LinkedIn for an e-copy there.