Doing less to achieve more this year

Help your team stop starting and start stopping.

Like technical debt in software, collaboration debt accumulates invisibly. The weekly meeting that could be async. The decision that doesn’t need consensus. The update no one reads.

Each piece seems small. Together, they create massive drag.

The irony of collaboration debt is that it usually accumulates from good intentions, including people being inclusive, maintaining meetings to stay connected, and keeping options open. But high-performing teams are ruthless editors. They understand that removing friction isn’t just about doing less work. It’s about removing what’s in the way of the work that matters.

The highest-performing teams don’t start the year by adding more. They begin by identifying and eliminating the friction that’s slowing everyone down. Remove the barrier and performance lifts.

The Subtraction Audit: Find Your Team’s Brake Points

Finding the time and energy to focus on what matters most requires identifying and removing the constraints that slow you down.

What’s gotten complicated that used to be simple? What’s a team process that’s accumulated barnacles? Your culture (aka your ways of working) can become ossified over time. How can you streamline a process that everyone recognises is too cumbersome?“It’s not the daily increase but the daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential” – Bruce Lee.

What are we doing out of habit, not need? Zombie work is commitments that everyone knows are going nowhere, but no one has officially killed. They drain energy through guilt and distraction without producing results. What is the team doing out of habit that it would never start today? The same applies to Ghost meetings. If we cancelled this meeting for a month, what would we actually miss?“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all” – Peter Drucker.

Where do we have Approval Friction? Some approvals and review cycles made sense when the team was smaller or the work was different. Where might there be unclear decision rights or coordination overhead that is slowing everything down? Instead of removing a task, how can you remove the permission blocker? Where is the team asking for permission they shouldn’t actually need?

Which rooms are too crowded? Too many people in the conversation. Some because they were relevant once, others because it felt safer to include them. But every extra person in a meeting or email thread exponentially increases coordination cost while decreasing clarity. Fact: Smaller teams outperform larger ones. Who’s in conversations who doesn’t need to be?

How can we shorten the time from hypothesis to insight? Is every stage necessary, or is this over-specified for what’s really needed?

Where can we make a smaller decision sooner? Rather than gather all the data needed to make a big decision, how could you break it down into smaller component decisions (decision stacking) and get moving quicker?

Which projects should be killed now? How do we overcome sunk-cost fallacy and make the brave decision to redirect our attention to higher value priorities?

Where are we re-inventing wheels? How could we codify ‘how-tos’  and learnings to leverage our collective experience? Where might a checklist be a helpful ‘external brain’ to help a colleague hit a quality standard and deliver more quickly?

A 15-Minute Team Exercise

1. Name it (5 mins): Go around the room. Each person names one example of collaboration debt they’re experiencing: a ghost meeting, zombie initiative, unnecessary approval, or crowded room.
2. Claim it (5 mins): As a team, choose one piece of debt to pay down this month. Not five. One. Something concrete you can actually stop or simplify.
3. Tame it (5 mins): Decide what “paid down” looks like. Cancel the meeting? Archive the project? Remove two people from the distribution list? Set the date when you’ll do it.

Your team likely has plenty of capability. What they might be missing is space to use it. Good luck finding and removing the brakes on your potential progress for 2026.

Want to identify the structural barriers slowing your team? Let’s talk about how to create the conditions for genuine collaboration.