Subtraction Is Additive

Why the effort it takes to strip something back is always worth it

Last week I was choosing the cover for my new book Decisions That Carry.

I have ideas. I have research. I have an amazing designer on the case. And the biggest thing any of them can do for me, is help me keep it simple. Restraint on full volume.

I’m drawn to clever images. The kind that signal more than they show, that reward a second look. But the research is unambiguous. What sells is simplicity. What people remember is a single clear image, not only a clever one. I know this. I still find it hard to hold back.

Stripping something back takes far longer than leaving it alone.

Simplicity is the result of effort, not the absence of it.

We tend to picture restraint as a shortcut, the version you get when you didn’t have time to do more. But every designer I’ve worked with says the same thing in different words: the plain cover took longer than the busy one. The clear sentence took longer than the clever paragraph. Someone had to decide what to leave out, and decide it enough times to be sure. I certainly had a lot of back and forth to drop some of my busier cover versions.

I can still recall my days at Amazon and the discipline, or shall I say refined skill, of getting ideas and reviews onto six pages and six pages only.

But I also learned this before I ever ran a business. As a child in an ordinary house.

What you are willing to remove, not what you’re willing to add.

As a teenager in the 80’s I can still remember helping my parents strip a wall in our 1920s house. It went on for what felt like months. Under the first paint was another colour. Under that, wallpaper. Under that, more wallpaper, more paint, a pattern nobody living could explain. Every layer had once been someone’s fix (or fantasy given the styles!). Every layer had made the wall a little further from itself, a little harder to recover from.

Businesses do the same thing with their own thinking and ways of working. A process gets complicated, so a new process gets added on top to manage it. A message gets confused, so another slide gets built to clarify it. Nobody sets out to bury the wall. They just keep responding to the last layer instead of asking what’s underneath it and deciding to strip it back.

That’s why complexity is so hard to fix. It’s rarely one problem. It’s a decade of well-meant additions, and someone has to believe there’s something simpler under there before they’ll even consider devoting time to find it.

Keeping my promise simple

I had the same ‘wall’ to strip with my own value proposition as well as the miniscule slot on a book cover to add my bio.

A 360-degree career doesn’t fit a phrase nor an algorithm, and that’s not the algorithm’s fault.

I’ve led at scale. I speak. I write. I advise, selectively. Every part comes from the same place, thirty years inside the business world, and every part feeds the others. I have variety too, with many geographies and companies worked for. But the world doesn’t want a person with hundreds of dimensions, at least not at some moments. It wants one word it can tag you under, or one core service you provide, one category you ‘own.’

I understand why. Nobody has time to hold four things about a stranger in their head let alone hundreds. Asking to be seen in full is asking for more attention than most people have to give. So I simplify myself, not because I am hiding or compromising, but because I want to be legible and succinct to the people I’m trying to reach.

Even though I’m ever more disciplined now to do that too, it never seems to be finished. I explain what I do, and I hear myself reaching for one more clause to cover one more angle, and I have to stop and take it back off again.

Like the wall. You think you’ve reached the plaster, and there’s another colour under that.

Visual clutter is the same thing killing our communications.

As I take 65,000 words and put them into 150 for the back blurb, it is painful. I know it is going to be worth it, and so I refine, remove, revise, and so on. The short version of the book, the blurb, definitely sells.

Why don’t we do this more across our communications?

• Strategies of 15 priorities that could be 3.

• A change programme that becomes constant workstream addition.

• Presentations of 60 slides that could be 5,

• And don’t get me started on the slides that have more than a report on them with font size < 20 that no one can read. Three bullets or one fact are often more impactful.

We could practice taking things away, or simply stop adding them.

Which raises the real question.

Is it optimisation, or is it care?

I’m generally suspicious of optimisation nowadays. Endless refining for its own sake is just another way of never finishing, dressed up as diligence. But I don’t think that’s what this is.

Stripping something back so it lands with someone else isn’t about polishing your own work. It’s about respecting how little attention the other person owes you. In a world when everyone is overwhelmed, arriving with anything less than simple starts to feel like a small failure of care, not a mark of quality.

So I’ve taken Decisions That Carry cover back as far as I can bear to. One idea. Standing on its own. Hoping it’s different enough to be remembered and plain enough to be trusted. I’ll share very soon.

I end the week proud of the restraint I am learning to build, not just the quality.

Look Again this week: What one thing in your work are you adding to instead of stripping back, a slide, an explanation. Are you ready to take off the top coat of decoration?

What did you strip out this week to get back to your core?

subtraction is more

Have a great week

Fiona

Look again. See what was always there.