Brilliant Team Math: Addition By Subtraction

Published in Forbes.com May 28, 2020

Seems like budget cuts, staffing cuts and revenue cuts are all the rage these days. Perhaps more than ever, you and your team will be required to do more with less — much less of everything.

At some point, that equation falls apart, but there exists an intersection of resourcefulness and efficiency that provides you and your entire team the opportunity to "add by subtracting." If you're game to play this exercise in brilliant math, let's do it!

When Less Creates More

Each of us has played in work teams, school classrooms or community clubs (like tennis or swimming) where excess seems to be the norm. The hidden dilemma in those scenarios exists because "normal" becomes invisible, and we run the classroom with everything from scissors to a full set of coloring pens for every child. That is both normal and expected, which hides other possibilities. This excess might exist because the school district, the families who live in that district or both are well-endowed with great funding.

Fair enough.

What do the kids learn, however, if each child never has to share or allocate resources? What do they learn, instead, if they do have to work together with limited amounts of classroom tools?

Let's look at each.

If every child has "one of everything" needed to function in class, that classroom has adequate resources to fund that scenario — rare, in this day and age for schools.

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