Before You Add a Step, Take One Away

THE FLOOR

Picture a second-shift lead whose line keeps shipping the wrong label. The fix on the table is a second check: one more person, one more initial, one more box on the form. Everybody nods. It feels like progress.

Six weeks later the form has eleven boxes. Nobody reads them. The wrong label ships anyway, and now it ships with two initials on it.

THE MISTAKE

When we fix something, we reach for more. More training, more checks, more reports, more meetings. Adding feels like action. Taking away feels like giving up.

Researchers have tested this. In a 2021 paper in Nature, Adams, Converse, Hales and Klotz ran eight experiments and found that people systematically default to searching for additions and overlook changes that take something away. The effect got stronger when people had only one shot at the problem and when they were under high mental load. Sound like a Tuesday on a busy floor? That is the point.

THE COST

Every step you add has to be done, trained, remembered and checked by somebody. Steps pile up. The job gets heavier, the crew gets slower, and the real problem hides under paperwork. The people doing the work stop trusting the process because the process keeps getting longer and the results do not.

THE MOVE (for the next shift)

Before you approve any new step, write two lists on one page.

1. What are we adding?
2. What could we remove, merge or stop doing that would get the same result?

Rules: no new step gets approved until the second list has at least one honest entry. Ask the person who does the job which step they skip when they are rushed. That step is a candidate. If it is safety, quality or legal, it stays. Say so out loud and move on to the next candidate.

Then try the removal on one line for one week, measure the same thing you were trying to fix, and keep whichever works.

WHAT IS DIFFERENT TOMORROW

The next fix on your desk gets a second list. Something comes off the process as something goes on. The process stops growing by default.

LIMITS

Subtraction is not a license to cut safety steps, required checks or training. Regulated work stays regulated. This is about steps that exist from habit, from an old problem, or from one bad day. The study shows a tendency in the lab. It does not prove your process is bloated. You still have to look.

Marc Bradburry
Big Bearded Ginger