The fastest way to improve a system is often to remove what is holding it back.
For years, my phone became progressively noisier.
Not because I was using it more, but because every application seemed to believe it deserved my attention. News alerts. Social media. Promotional emails. Shopping apps. Software updates. Before long, my day was punctuated by a steady stream of pings, vibrations, banners, and badges. None of them seemed particularly important on their own. Together, however, they created a constant background of interruption that gradually became normal. Like most things we experience every day, I stopped noticing how often my attention was being pulled away because the interruptions had simply become part of life.
Eventually, I had enough.
There wasn’t a defining moment. I simply became irritated. Every few days I turned another notification off. Then another. Then another. Over time, almost every notification disappeared. Today, my phone is essentially mute. Phone calls, though still rare in today’s culture, still come through because they usually matter. Calendar reminders remain because I genuinely rely on them. Everything else waits until I decide it deserves my attention.
For quite a while, that was simply how I described my phone to friends. Then, one day, I caught myself smiling. I wasn’t discovering a new idea. I was recognizing an old one. As a rehabilitation clinician, I had spent years thinking about systems, behaviour change, participation, and the unintended consequences of interventions. My phone had quietly become one of the simplest examples of those ideas that I had ever encountered. Without setting out to prove anything, I had improved an important part of my day by removing something rather than adding something.
That small experience has stayed with me because it runs against one of our strongest instincts.
When something isn’t working, most of us immediately start thinking about what to add. Another treatment. Another meeting. Another policy. Another medication. Another strategy. Another app. We instinctively assume that improvement arrives through accumulation. The more complicated the problem, the more likely we are to believe that the solution must be equally complicated.
Systems rarely work that way.
One of the central ideas in systems thinking is that every system has a bottleneck. Somewhere within the system there is usually one factor that limits everything else. Improve every other part while ignoring the bottleneck and progress is often disappointing. Remove the bottleneck, however, and improvements frequently ripple throughout the entire system. Systems thinkers often refer to these limiting factors as constraints, but the underlying idea is remarkably simple. Before trying to improve everything, find what is quietly preventing the system from working well in the first place.
Rehabilitation provides examples of this every day.
When progress slows, the temptation is often to introduce another intervention. Occasionally that is exactly the right decision. Just as often, however, the more important question is whether something is preventing the existing rehabilitation plan from succeeding. A person may have excellent clinicians, appropriate goals, strong family support, and well-designed treatment, yet poor sleep, unmanaged pain, sensory overload, financial stress, or an unhealthy environment may still be acting as the system’s bottleneck. Until that obstacle is reduced, adding more therapy may simply add more effort without producing much additional progress.
Interestingly, behavioural science suggests that our preference for addition is more than habit. It appears to be a bias. Leidy Klotz and his colleagues demonstrated that people consistently overlook subtractive solutions, even when removing something produces a better outcome. Faced with a problem, our minds naturally search for what can be introduced before considering what might be removed.
The same pattern appears in working life.
Many people respond to long hours and mounting demands by searching for another way to become more efficient. A different calendar. Better software. A new planning method. A more effective workflow. Each solution assumes the same thing: that the nervous system can continue producing more if we simply organize it well enough.
That assumption deserves to be questioned.
Yet elite athletes have understood for decades that performance depends as much on recovery as it does on training. They do not become stronger by training continuously. They become stronger because demanding effort is followed by adequate recovery, allowing the body and brain to adapt before the next challenge arrives. Human performance is no different. Whether we are talking about rehabilitation, healthcare, education, or professional life, a nervous system can sustain high levels of effort only when recovery is built into the system itself. Recovery is not the reward for hard work. It is one of the biological conditions that makes sustained performance possible.
Sometimes the highest-value intervention isn’t another productivity strategy at all. Sometimes it is taking a proper lunch break, leaving work on time, taking three days away from the office, or finally using the vacation that has been sitting untouched in the calendar. Viewed through the lens of systems, those decisions are not acts of laziness. They are deliberate attempts to remove one of the largest bottlenecks limiting the entire system.
That is why this heuristic has become one of my favourites.
Remove before you add.
It is not a rule. There will always be situations where adding another intervention is exactly the right decision. It is simply a reminder to pause before following our first instinct. Before making an already complicated system even more complicated, ask whether there is something quietly working against it.
Sometimes the most powerful intervention is not introducing something new. Sometimes it is finally removing what never belonged there in the first place.
References
Klotz, L. E., Bolger, C., Gettel, C. R., Nichols, A. J., Watson, G. P., Yoon, H., & Inbar, Y. (2021). Subtractive change. Nature, 592(7853), 258-261.
Meadows, D. H. (2008). Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing.
Norman, D. A. (2013). The Design of Everyday Things (Revised and Expanded Edition). Basic Books.
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