[0:00]A couple of weeks ago, I shared the story of the Diderot Effect. The Diderot Effect is about our urge to add. It states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption, which leads us to acquire more new things. As a result, we end up buying things that our previous selves never needed to feel happy or fulfilled. Today's story is about the power of subtraction, not addition. A story I first heard in Tim Hartford's podcast, Cautionary Tales. Hi, welcome back to Stories at Work, a series where I share real stories from across the world that you can use when you want to drive home a business point. Our website www.storyworks.in already has over a hundred stories and we're adding one every week. Let's start today's story.
[1:05]The story begins in 2007 with a guy by the name of Ryan McFarland. Ryan came from a long line of motorsport junkies. His grandfather was a race car engineer, and daddy McFarland ran a motorcycle shop. All this meant that Ryan spent his childhood having fun with all kinds of bikes. In fact, when he grew up, he made a name for himself by patenting a better seat for a bike. So you can imagine Ryan's joy when he finally became a dad himself. Pretty much as soon as his son Bode was out of the womb, Ryan was ready to pass on the McFarland family love of wheels. Bode was just two years old when he got his first cycle, but riding a bike, Ryan quickly found out is kind of hard for a toddler. But Ryan was a bit obsessed to the point of spending over $2,000 worth of traditional learn-to-ride vehicles like the tricycle, training-wheel bikes and even a training-wheel-equipped motorcycle. However, as he observed his eager young boy trying to operate these machines, he realized that they were all too large, too heavy, and too complicated. Plus, they didn't focus on the fundamental science of balance. The solution was either to wait for a couple of years for his son to grow up or build him a better machine, so he created the better machine. His solution was to start with a typical bike, but rather than add something to the new bike's design, he chose to take something away. He got rid of the pedals. Ryan was the first to design what is now known as the Strider bike. Kids can easily get the bike moving by putting their feet on the ground. Without pedals to worry about, even a two-year-old could ride it. On the Strider bike, Bode was able to learn how to steer and balance, all the stuff he'd need when he graduated to a real bike. Ryan realized that it wasn't just Bode who could benefit from this little garage creation. Kids around the world could experience the same success, adventure, and freedom. The Strider company was born and as on date has sold more than 4 million pedal less bikes. What a story. This story about Ryan's project is in a book by Leidy Klotz. He's a professor of engineering at the University of Virginia. He's written this awesome book called Subtract, the Untapped Science of Less. In this book, he describes all these experiments where he shows just how hard it is for adults to figure out to solve a problem that requires taking something away. He does these fun studies with his college students where he shows them this kind of Lego brick that is uneven. It isn't balanced because it's got one Lego in the wrong spot. And he asks the subject to do something to make this structure a little bit more stable. And so the subjects have two choices. They could add a bunch of new blocks so that this structure becomes more stable, or they could just take away that one stupid block that's extra on one side, and then all of a sudden, the things would balance better. But what he finds that even if you suggest to the subjects that it is possible to take away stuff, subjects have a really hard time doing this. They're much more likely to add a bunch of stuff, which takes much more time than if you were to just take something away. Leidy Klotz found that subjects continue to display this kind of addition bias, even when you charge them for the number of extra blocks that they're going to use. So subjects now have to pay 10 cents for every extra block they put in, and it's really still hard for them to figure out that they have to take some stuff away to make this work best.
[5:00]In another example, he got people to suggest improvements to a recipe for soup. How do you make it better? And people would always suggest, oh, well, you could add some cream, or garlic, or salt or whatever. Essentially, most people suggest adding steps or adding ingredients and very few people said, no, no, no, you need to take away this ingredient because it's going to swamp everything else. Now, let's listen to Leidy Klotz and understand where his idea first came from. It was actually Legos with my three year old son. So I've got a replica here. We were playing Legos and we were building a bridge and as you can see, here, the problem was the bridge wasn't level. So I turned around to grab a block to add to the shorter column or yeah, but then by the time I had turned back around, my three-year-old had removed a block from the longer column to make the level bridge. So it's clear that we are not born with this. somehow along the way we developed quite a deep addition bias in the way we think. What we need to do is consciously cultivate the muscle of subtracting. Not new projects, not new brands, not new forms to fill, not new processes to follow. We need to look at what will increase efficiency and effectiveness when we remove stuff. I hope you enjoyed that story and if you did, there are many more on our website www.storyworks.in. See you next week. Bye for now.
