Change management: what should be removed before anything is added?
A change project generally describes what should be introduced, less often what should disappear. The management question is precise: before adding a new arrangement, do we genuinely examine which tasks, approvals or documents could be removed?
What the literature establishes
Gabrielle S. Adams, Benjamin A. Converse, Andrew H. Hales and Leidy E. Klotz (2021, Nature) show, in experiments involving changes to objects, ideas and situations, that participants overlook subtractive solutions. Their findings suggest that this omission is not simply a preference for addition: subtractive options are not always considered. For change management, this invites a distinction between a removal that was examined and rejected and one that was never considered.
Why existing arrangements retain an advantage
William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser (1988, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty) identify a bias towards the status quo in the choices they studied. This mechanism differs from overlooking subtractive options: a removal option may be identified but rejected because the current state enjoys an advantage. Together, these studies suggest two separate questions: did we look for what could be removed, and did we then assess that possibility without automatically favouring existing arrangements?
The premature conclusion
One might infer that a successful transformation should remove more than it adds. These studies do not support that conclusion: a control, an approval or a redundancy may serve an essential purpose. The point is not to make removal a target, but to give it an explicit place among the options considered. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these findings do not demonstrate
These studies do not compare business transformations according to the number of tasks removed, nor do they demonstrate organisational performance gains from subtraction. In practice, an apparently unnecessary task may protect another department, a customer or a traceability requirement. Removing it therefore requires checking its dependencies, not merely obtaining agreement from the team that performs it.
A practical check in Vevey
In Vevey, with its global food industry environment, group headquarters and Riviera SMEs, SHR's “Change Management” programme can provide a framework for reviewing possible removals before a new arrangement is launched. For every recurring task added, record an existing task whose removal was considered, the decision made and the reasons for it, including regulatory or quality constraints. The proposed indicator is the proportion of added tasks for which this review is documented, not the number of removals achieved. For removals actually tested, then compare processing time and rework on comparable cases to check that a local reduction does not simply shift the workload elsewhere. To go further: explore the Change Leadership training in Vevey in the canton of Vaud, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Change Leadership in Vevey
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