Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

by Greg McKeown

TO FIGHT THIS FEAR, RUN A REVERSE PILOT One of the ideas that has grown popular in business circles in recent years is “prototyping.” Building a prototype, or large-scale model, allows companies to test-run an idea or product without making a huge investment up front. Exactly the same idea can be used in reverse to eliminate non-essentials in a relatively low-risk way, by running what Daniel Shapero, a director at LinkedIn, calls a “reverse pilot.”10 In a reverse pilot you test whether removing an initiative or activity will have any negative consequences. For example, when an executive I work with took on a new senior role in the company, he inherited a process his predecessor had gone to a huge effort to implement: a huge, highly visual report on a myriad of subjects produced for the other executives each week. It consumed enormous energy from his team, and he hypothesised that it was not adding a great deal of value to the company. So to test his hypothesis he ran a reverse pilot. He simply stopped publishing the report and waited to see what the response would be. What he found was that no one seemed to miss it; after several weeks nobody had even mentioned the report. As a result, he concluded that the report was not essential to the business and could be eliminated.