How to Do More With Less

I just got off a project that was told to do more with less. The realization didn’t come at first. The leader delivered the news well. There was no spin, no jargon, no softening the blow.

She said the number. Immediately, everyone was thinking: We're going to have to do more with less. She then said she knew it was hard and that it was unexpected. She said she had faith in the team and that they would figure it out.

But a 40 percent cut? That’s rough. Even for the best teams.

And then, over the next three weeks, that team worked silently to rebuild the exact same plan they'd run the year before, just smaller.

Nobody invented anything. Nobody got creative. Everyone played it safe. I've seen this happen enough times that I stopped thinking of it as a fluke.

Yet something very interesting happens from time to time. Some teams get cut and come back with the best work they've ever done. They use the challenge to deliver some of the best work they have ever done because it forces a clarity that only a cut can introduce.

So what separates the teams that thrive under budget pressure from the ones that succumb to the weight? Here are three battle-tested real-world creative tools you can use the next time you are faced with a budget cut.

1. Name the Tradeoff

Unless we are willing to accept that the budget cut brings in a necessary pruning, we are fighting against the inevitable.¹ So instead, say the scary part out loud. Say out loud what you are choosing to give up.

It feels like admitting failure. And it’s uncomfortable. But this is not admitting failure.

What you're actually doing is handing your team permission to lose something, and in that permission to lose is what unlocks the ability to rebuild.² Surprisingly, this step sparks creativity³ in the team.

I worked one time with a meeting director who did this in a room I was standing in. She named the three things her group was going to stop doing as a result of the cut, by name, right there in front of everyone.

The strange thing was that you could feel the temperature in the room change. Half the people who had been carrying those three burdens for months felt immediately relieved and were now free to get creative about another portion of the event.

2. Cut the List to One

Scarcity is going to narrow down the attention to one thing only.⁴ And that is super-helpful when it comes to how to do more with less. When facing cuts, naming the trade-off is necessary. And the immediate follow-up is that you now have to cut the list to one most important thing.

People in the organization tend to resist this cut because narrowing to one feels reckless. It feels irresponsible. It's almost perceived as a rash decision, one that is made without carefully considering other options that often yield more than one result.

Yet the truth is that cutting the list down to one is the exact opposite.⁵ The reckless or irresponsible version is asking for six things with the resources for one and letting everyone go off and choose which five to fail at.

When we cut the list down to one, we narrow down the essentials of the cut and offer the opportunity for responsibility on that selection. That responsibility creates ownership, and that usually leads to the list being cut down to the most important compromise.

3. Practice Constraint Before It Rears Its Ugly Head

This is one of the key differentiators between teams that thrive under budget cut pressure and the ones who collapse under such pressure. It’s practicing the inevitable.⁶

If every budget grew every time, we would be living in a fantasy land. Sometimes budgets go up, sometimes they come down. Practicing for the inevitability is just a good creative pathway.

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What I do to help inspire teams to practice the constraint is to make an artificial one within the team. Not when it is necessary, and not waiting for something to be broken. It’s all about making the proactive choice⁷ to play within a smaller box.

Take the next project and shave off 20 percent and see if the team can still thrive. Take the next quarter and trim 15 percent. Proactively.

Even individual team members can do this practice routine to get in shape for the eventuality that there will be a cut at some point. And they will be ready to go with creative and innovative solutions from the get-go.

At the end of the day, if you're leading a team through less right now, here's one sentence to say tomorrow that can change everything and unlock creative solutions⁸: OK, so here's the one thing we have to get right this year, and here's what we're letting go of to do it.

What is often missing is somebody willing to stand up and say what matters now, and what doesn't anymore. And that one statement can unlock potential that will allow your team to thrive under budget pressure.