4 Ways to Use Subtraction That Could Make Life Better miragenews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from miragenews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Nature, University of Virginia researchers explain why people rarely think of removing something as a solution when looking at a situation, object or idea that needs improving. Instead, people almost always add some element, whether it helps or not.
The team s findings suggest a fundamental reason for several problems: why people struggle with overwhelming schedules; why institutions become bogged down in red tape; and, of particular interest to researchers, why humanity is exhausting the planet s resources. It happens in engineering design, which is my main interest, said co-author Leidy Klotz. But it also happens in writing, cooking and everything else just think about your own work and you will see it. The first thing that comes to our minds is, what can we add to make it better. Our paper shows that we do this to our detriment, even when the only right answer is to subtract. Even with financial incentives, we still don t think to take away.
May 1, 2021
Why is everything so darned complicated? And I really mean everything: our taxes, schedules, bureaucracies, machines, algorithms, org charts, our school and welfare and health care systems, you name it.
Even and I say this as an oft culpable columnist our diction. “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out,” George Orwell stipulated in one of his rules of writing. I’m tempted to edit him thus: If it is possible to cut a word [out], [always] cut it [out].
The simplicity Orwell yearned for is synonymous with clarity, elegance, efficiency and integrity. It’s an ideal a lot of us subscribe to in theory but keep violating in practice. A lamentable secret of the universe seems to be that it takes enormous effort to simplify, but no effort at all to do the opposite. Put differently, it’s easier to add things, even unnecessary ones, than to subtract.
“When people try to make something better… they don’t think that they can remove or subtract unless they are somehow prompted to do so,” said behavioural scientist Gabrielle Adams from the University of Virginia Through a series of controlled experiments that then followed the initial puzzle problems, the team gently nudged participants toward using subtraction as the answer, not addition. The results showed that when prompted that subtracting was an option, it assisted participants in considering that adding was not the only solution. Scientist Benjamin Converse, also part of the team, added thinking in pluses instead of minuses could well contribute to modern-day excesses such as cluttered homes .
Business Leaders Often Overlook This Brilliant Problem-Solving Strategy When Making Career Decisions forbes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from forbes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.