In a world telling us we need to optimise all the things, adopt the latest AI hack, and treat everything as important — subtraction can feel rebellious. But what if the key to the results you want lies in removal, reorientation, and refinement rather than accumulation? In this conversation, Andrea Levinson sits down with Donna McGeorge to explore why strategic subtraction is becoming one of the most important leadership capabilities of our time. Donna shares the Lego bridge story behind Red Brick Thinking, why more data in a business case can actually undermine your credibility, how the 85% capacity rule challenges our most deeply held beliefs about performance — and why, sometimes, busy is just lazy.

Five Things That Stayed With Me

1. Addition bias: our default response to every problem is to add more

When a business case isn't landing, we add more data. When a project stalls, we add a committee. When a calendar is full, we add a meeting to discuss the meeting. We almost never ask: is there something we could remove that would make this clearer, easier, or more effective? Red Brick Thinking is the practice of making subtraction the first question, not the last resort.

2. Three data points is the sweet spot for influence — more actually works against you

Research suggests that three pieces of evidence or data is the optimal number for persuasion. Not five. Not eight. Three. Beyond that, you don't get diminishing returns — you lose credibility and increase skepticism. The person you're trying to convince starts to wonder what you're overcompensating for. The discipline of removing data from your argument, your deck, your business case, is a leadership act, not a shortcut.

3. The 85% capacity rule: the buffer is the point

Most leaders operate at 100% as their baseline — which means any crisis, opportunity, or unexpected demand pushes them straight into the red zone. Donna's prescription: aim for 85%. The 15% buffer isn't slack. It's the space where thinking happens, where real relationships are built, where decisions get made well. A car that runs flat out all the time doesn't make it to the next service. Leaders are no different.

4. Busy is lazy

Busy feels productive because your brain can coast. Sitting through email, attending meetings you don't need, responding to every message as it lands — these are low-resistance activities that fill time without requiring discernment. Real leadership — thinking, relating, deciding — requires more cognitive effort than busy allows. If you're too busy to think, you're not leading. You're coasting.

5. Three types of red bricks — structural, cultural, and emotional

Structural red bricks are the obvious ones: meetings, projects, processes, committees that have outgrown their purpose. Cultural red bricks are the stories: about what good leadership looks like, what a strong work ethic demands, what you owe the organisation. Emotional red bricks are the obligations you said yes to that now feel like resentment. You can recognise all of them by how they feel. A reliable signal: if you said yes and now you're resentful, that's a red brick worth examining.

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Quotes Worth Holding

"Sometimes busy is lazy. You're not thinking correctly, not making the right choices, not being discerning enough about where you're spending your time." — Donna McGeorge

"When you make the decision once, you don't have to make it a thousand other times. It's much easier to be 100% committed than 99% committed." — Donna McGeorge

"Leaders are paid to think. Then to relate. Then to make decisions. If there's no space in your diary for any of those three, what on earth are you doing?" — Donna McGeorge

"What story could we stop telling? That's a red brick." — Donna McGeorge

"There is so much power in defining what your enough is." — Andrea Levinson

What We Explored

0:00 Introduction: strategic subtraction in a world of poly crisis

3:00 Change equals loss — why we hoard, hold on, and keep adding instead

5:00 Three data points: why more evidence actually reduces your influence

9:20 The "someday" red brick — deferring happiness to a future that never arrives

13:30 Agency, identity and the stories we tell ourselves about work

19:30 The tyranny of mediocrity: why we only act when things get bad enough

25:00 The 85% capacity rule — why full throttle is unsustainable

37:00 Three practical tactics for strategic subtraction

45:00 The Lego bridge — how Red Brick Thinking got its name

About Donna McGeorge

Donna McGeorge is a productivity expert, speaker, and author of 15 books, including Red Brick Thinking, The 1 Day Refund, and The 25-Minute Meeting. For over two decades she has been helping leaders and organisations do more with less — not by working harder, but by making smarter choices about where attention goes. Her work sits at the intersection of time, energy, and strategic thinking, and she is known for making complex ideas practical, actionable, and often disarmingly funny. Red Brick Thinking, her latest book, tackles addition bias head-on: why we default to adding when faced with problems, and how subtraction can be the most radical and effective leadership move available.

If this conversation resonated, explore more insights and resources at andrealevinson.com.au

Full Transcript

Lightly edited for readability. The full timestamped version is available on YouTube.

ANDREA: Welcome to Leadership at the Edge. I'm really excited to dive into this conversation today. This Leadership at the Edge experiment for me this year is about having beautiful conversations I find genuinely interesting with amazing humans — and rather than being selfish and just doing that myself, opening it up, because there are a lot of people who are really curious about how people are thinking and how work is shifting and evolving.

DONNA: Everything's changing. Everything's different. Every time you turn around, there's something new. If we just talked about AI for five seconds, there's a whole bunch of newness in that. The world is ever changing, my friend.

ANDREA: Wild. And there's so much possibility in that. And also — I'll never forget the moment that somebody articulated "change equals loss." Whenever anything is shifting or changing, we're losing something. Which brings on so much fear, uncertainty, scarcity, discomfort.

DONNA: People do not like a feeling of loss. It almost immediately sharpens up their scarcity. And so suddenly they hoard or collect or hold on — to things, to emotions, to people. Which makes it even harder to let go.

ANDREA: And at this particular point in the world, there is so much shifting. At a conference yesterday they were talking about poly crisis — this sense that we're not just facing one crisis, but multiple overlapping crises merging all at once. AI is one thread. But there are others. Of course that impacts our lives, our work, the strategies that do or don't work in organisations, the way leaders show up.

ANDREA: When I was reading your new book, Red Brick Thinking, I think you've articulated a lot of that really clearly and simply — even at this basic level, that we overvalue what we already have. And if we come from that perspective, of course we're going to end up with layers and layers of fossilised stuff that maybe does or doesn't serve us anymore.

DONNA: I didn't even realise I was writing a book about poly crisis. Go figure. But you're right — the angle of "we overvalue what we already have" is interesting. It's human instinct: sameness equals safety. If I've already got it, it's the same as what I had, and that feels safer than anything new or different. It also feels safer because it becomes like a security blanket, a big roll of bubble wrap. I hold on to it and wrap myself in it to feel safe. And I'm not going to let it go.

DONNA: This book was about: let's have a really good look at what we can let go of. Because for leaders in organisations, it's one thing to say — we've got poly crisis, or just poly projects. We've got so much going on. But for me to say "let some of it go" feels irresponsible to a lot of people. Like you can't just stop doing things. But something has to give. And this book wanted to cover not just the "cancel a meeting" lever — which is what most of us fall back on — but also where in our personal lives are we carrying around more weight, more heaviness, more baggage. I wanted it to be a more holistic approach.

ANDREA: I heard something at the conference yesterday that really landed around influence and data points. I gravitate towards "more is more" — if I give you more data and more evidence, my argument is more persuasive. And certainly a lot of executives I work with are in the same boat: how do I add more to this business case so it gets across the line?

DONNA: Yes. And there was clear data shared — three pieces of data or evidence is the sweet spot. Not five, not eight. Three. And it's not even that you get diminishing returns from extra pieces of information. You actually lose credibility and influence from the fourth, fifth, sixth data point. You increase scepticism. Which blew my mind a little bit.

ANDREA: I can see that, because often the reason we add the extra data isn't really for the other person — it's covering our own bases. "I'm not comfortable making this decision, so I'll send you off on a more evidence journey." More data as a way of deferring the call.

DONNA: Exactly. And that's the crux of the book. This idea that more somehow equals better. Our instinct when presented with a problem is to add. Problem: I'm worried the business case won't land. Solution: add more data, add more evidence, add another case study, add a committee, add more slides. We just keep adding. And rarely do people ask: is there something we could take away that would make this clearer? More obvious? Easier to grasp? That's what got me onto this whole thing.

ANDREA: I was thinking about the evolution of your books — meetings, maximising time, AI, and now Red Brick Thinking. At a quick glance it really does trace the trajectory of how we've been thinking about how to create more value. And I think what we actually want, underneath all of it, is a more fulfilling, rewarding, joyful life.

DONNA: That's the end game. Why do we go to work and work like Trojans and do ridiculous hours? So that at some point I have a good life, or I'm providing a good life for my family. That's the end game. And I think a lot of people lose sight of it. I talk about means goals and ends goals. A job is a means goal — it's a means to an end. And sometimes we make the job the end goal. And suddenly we're drowning in stuff.

ANDREA: Humans are curious creatures. Ultimately what you're talking about is this fallacy of "I'll be happy one day."

DONNA: There's a whole chapter in this book called the red brick of someday. How "someday I'll be happy." Someday when this project is done. Someday I'll wear my best outfit, carry my best handbag, use the best crockery. We put off happiness now to a later, bigger, better happiness down the track. And we've all heard stories about the person who retires at 65, finally ready to jump in the caravan and travel — and has a heart attack in the driveway. I actually know someone that happened to.

ANDREA: We have admired that hustle, that work ethic. I certainly grew up with role models of: you work hard. You work long. The family sacrifices. And so we learned that kids stayed out of the way of work. Work was really, really important.

DONNA: And this is why I think younger generations — millennials and Gen Z — are actually better at this. They've created clearer boundaries around working hours and they don't understand the question of "show your commitment by working longer." Which I love. Work ethic is changing. It's not better or worse — it's just changing. And I'm here for it.

ANDREA: I think we have a lot to learn from people who trigger us. And I see that a lot in more experienced leaders. "How dare they." But also — what is it about me and my stories and my beliefs about what success looks like and what it takes to get there that is challenged by this behaviour? Because if someone at an earlier career stage can create these boundaries and get promoted faster than I was — does that mean I did something wrong?

DONNA: You've just hit the nail on the head. A large part of this book is about the stories we tell ourselves — about obligations, guilt, perfectionism — woven in with agency. A lot of the excuses we use: "I have no agency over the hours I work or the meetings I go to or the projects I take on — it's just the nature of the work." And I say: is that a story we tell ourselves? It's a leadership flex, I reckon, when you can recognise you're telling yourself a story — and then adjust to that.

ANDREA: Because if we are going to continue to grow and evolve, and the pace and nature of the external world is pushing us to do that more often — it's a bit like balancing on a Bosu ball. It's a really active process. We're constantly re-calibrating, adjusting so we can stay centred and not fall over. And the worst thing we can do in that situation is go rigid.

ANDREA: And I think for a lot of us, that's what we do in our relationship with work. We decided: this is the one way it's going to go. This is the career I picked, the ladder I'm climbing. And I can relate to this personally — I changed from business accounting into psychology mid-degree, trained and practised as a psychologist for 25 years, and then last year stepped away from that registration. The rigidity would have been staying and saying: this is me, done.

DONNA: Right. And there's two things. First: the story you tell yourself. And second: what we attach our identity to. When we attach our identity to being "a champion tennis player" or "a psychologist" — unless I am that thing, I am not a good person. I've watched it with enough people in business who are attached to their title or their company or the work they do. When that goes away, they've got nothing. So agency, story, and identity — they go hand in hand. When you're more whole internally, you just make better choices and better decisions. Just quietly — a better life.

ANDREA: Once we realise that we genuinely have agency — that we have a choice each and every moment — there's so much power in that that we often give away to the people around us.

DONNA: Which is why I love the idea — have you read The Top Five Regrets of the Dying? Ultimately when we get to the end, we want to look back and say: I was myself. I enjoyed my life. I invested my time, energy, presence, and attention with people who were valuable to me. Yes, work is fulfilling and connecting and challenging, and it's a beautiful fertile ground to grow and contribute and create legacy. But not at the cost of everything else.

ANDREA: I want to ask about Red Brick Thinking and the idea of the "tyranny of mediocrity." Because as I was reading what you created in this book, that was part of what was sticking in my head. We are really great at galvanising to action when something is obviously broken or terrible — do or die, yes, I'm making a choice. And if something is amazing, great. But at that middle zone, we find it so hard. The relationship that's kind of okay, but I don't feel great every time I leave the meeting. The job that pays the bills and I'm kind of good at, but I'm not lit up or getting progression. It's not that bad. And we stay.

DONNA: You've nailed it. It's when things aren't urgent. We wait for crisis. No wonder we have poly crisis — we literally wait for things to break before we move. I use a simple metaphor: I wait until the bookcase is so full it's falling apart before I think about culling. My calendar is absolutely booked and I'm getting sick — then I'll start making decisions. My suggestion is: why wouldn't you create a life where the everyday crisis doesn't have to happen every day? Does every evening have to end with falling in a heap on the couch?

ANDREA: And I think part of the challenge is, in that place of overwhelm and busyness, we often feel we don't have any agency. We're so blinkered and in that threat response that options just don't compute.

DONNA: And so I do future pacing with people. What is the worst thing that could happen? And if that happened, what would you do? People say: "I'd get sacked." Really? Do you know how hard it is to get sacked in an organisation in Australia? It can take 12 months. You'll find another job by then. So what's the second worst thing? "It's career-limiting." Is speaking truth to power and showing up in a way that shows you care going to limit your career? I don't think so. What's the next worst thing? And so on. Often all you need is 10 seconds of courage to say the thing — and once you're on the other side of that, life is okay.

ANDREA: Let's talk about the 85% capacity rule. Because it connects directly to all of this.

DONNA: So we should be operating at about 85% capacity — giving us a 15% buffer so we're not full all the time. A lot of us — and I can relate to this from early in my consulting career — ramp up to 100% and then hold it there as the baseline. And when an emergency or a great opportunity drops in, we have to go into the red zone. We're revving the engine at 110, 120%. And then that becomes the new baseline expectation.

DONNA: Just about everything in nature, in manufacturing — even the Starship Enterprise — never operates at warp nine the whole time. It generally travels at warp three because it knows it'll blow its engines up. No one drives their car flat out all the time. At some point, you service it. There's a stat that our car is actually used about 4% of the time. The rest of the time it's parked. Why don't we give humans the same recovery window?

ANDREA: And the industrial age framing sits under so much of this, doesn't it? Human labour as a unit — put more in, get more product out. Which is very engineering thinking. But humans don't operate that way. And I think part of what we're seeing shift is our understanding of the nature of the system we're operating within. It's not a production line. It's not an engineering system.

DONNA: This is the thing that bugs me most. Engineers would get this — even production lines have to shut down for maintenance. At some point a widget breaks. And we say: that's normal, that's wear and tear. Why don't we give humans the same? We have four weeks' annual leave in Australia — meant to take it. But how many people take their laptop and phone with them, sitting by a pool in Bali on their phone doing email? The pool is right there and you're asking people to keep the noise down because you're on a call.

ANDREA: I get why people do it. My nervous system responds in a particular way when I imagine that scenario. But if we shift perspective a little, we can appreciate: by always being available, always dispensing solutions, always being responsive — we're teaching people how to relate to and interact with us. We're training them what to expect.

DONNA: Exactly. And if we're also working parents — we do our day shift, get home, and there's another bunch of people needing a piece of us. It gets to 11pm, we fall into bed, and we're up at 6am to start again. That's not enough sleep. And so I wonder if there's a revolution ahead. Will millennials follow the leadership lessons they've seen — always on, always available, always sacrificial — or are we going to see a shift? And I think businesses will say, "But we won't make as many widgets." But if we're not making as many widgets, maybe people don't want to buy as many widgets.

ANDREA: There is so much power in defining what your enough is. And defining your version of a satisfying, fulfilling, joyful life. When we do that, we get to make really smart choices that we feel confident owning — about what we're willing to trade for work.

DONNA: And it takes pressure off you too. I'm reminded of Karrie Webb the golfer, giving advice to a young Australian champion. Her advice was: always just go for par. And if you happen to get a birdie, great. Know what is enough. If you happen to get a bit more, that's wonderful. But knowing what enough is takes a lot of pressure off.

DONNA: I've actually written 15 books. The first eight or so I don't talk about much. The last seven have been the ones people know. And I don't yet know what enough books are for me — I think I've got more in me. But I do think about this season of my life and what slowing down might look like. And it all comes back to being clear about what is enough.

ANDREA: Okay, so we've had a very conceptual conversation — which I love — and also, if I'm in that state of overwhelmed, pursuing more, swamped by all of the things, I can imagine going: "Yeah, great, but what the hell do I actually do?" What do you see as easy steps or tactics to start subtracting strategically?

DONNA: The first lever is meetings. Just about everyone I speak to says they have way too many. And the easiest thing is: just don't go to some of them. Don't wait for permission. So many organisations invite a cast of thousands, and then we use excuses like "optics" — and then we sit in the meeting doing email the whole time anyway. So get rid of some.

DONNA: The second is protecting time. I protect from 8 till 10 every morning — as much as I can from meetings. Then an hour in the afternoon, and a 45-minute lunch break. When I say that out loud, people assume I must not be doing anything. But you can still have three or four meetings a day — they just go in around the protected blocks. The principle, which is a bit Stephen Covey, is: the big rocks aren't the jobs. They're the space. The space to think, the space to breathe. That goes in first.

ANDREA: I'd add: as a leader, you're paid to think. Then to relate to people. Then to make decisions. Not to have meetings about meetings or to be everybody's problem-solver. So if there's no space in your diary to do those three things, what exactly are you doing?

DONNA: Exactly. You're going to a series of meetings discussing things that never get resolved, engaged in email threads going around with 20 people for a month still not resolved, and telling yourself stories about what's important while prioritising the non-important things.

DONNA: Sometimes busy is lazy. "I'm just too busy for that." No — you're just not thinking correctly. You're not making the right choices. You're not being discerning enough about where you're spending your time. Your brain can coast through email. It feels busy. But it's the low-resistance option. Stop being busy and start being discerning. That's what leadership is about.

ANDREA: And let's just normalise lazy for a second. Our brain is an energy-efficient machine. Our default position in the face of overwhelm is to choose the easy thing. That's not a character flaw — it's just the operating system. So yes, of course, we gravitate to clearing email and calling it productive.

DONNA: The third thing is making some decisions today that will benefit your future self. These can be about health, about how you spend your time, about relationships. But the key principle is: it's much easier to be 100% committed than 99% committed. 99% means you're making the decision again and again every time the situation arises. 100% means you make the decision once and you're done. That's what you want.

ANDREA: I'd add a fourth: build your coaching and questioning skills. So that each time someone brings you a problem, you punt it back — you build their capability to solve their own problems rather than solving it for them. Yes, it takes 5 minutes more now. But it saves you 5 hours this quarter. And with that extra time, you can rise to the right altitude and focus on the work that is actually highest value.

DONNA: That's exactly it. We are in alignment.

ANDREA: Now — I want to hear the bridge story. The red brick. Can you show us how Red Brick Thinking actually got its name?

DONNA: So when I was researching my book The One Day Refund, I came across research on something called addition bias — this tendency, when we're stuck, to just add a new process, policy, procedure, meeting, committee to solve the problem. That's when I started thinking about what I came to call strategic subtraction: when presented with a problem, what would happen if we took something away instead?

DONNA: I started using this little Lego bridge in my presentations. It's crooked — one leg is longer than the other. And I ask people: how would you fix it? Ninety-five percent of people pick up another Lego brick and stick it on the bottom. "Yeah, now it's even." Very rarely does anyone take away the red brick that was making it uneven in the first place.

DONNA: One day I was doing this live and I said, "What if we just remove the red brick?" And I started saying: you could "red brick" something. This is about red bricking. And then I went — oh, this is Red Brick Thinking. You've got to think red brick. That's the thing. So it could have been green brick thinking, blue brick thinking. It just happened to be that day. And that's what I now call the red brick revelation — the moment people go: oh, you can solve the problem by removing.

DONNA: And then the big question becomes: where are the red bricks in your world that are worth removing?

ANDREA: So what could the red bricks be? Projects, strategies, meetings, emails — maybe there's an unsubscribe revolution to be had —

DONNA: Yes. And you've just named what I call structural red bricks. But there are also cultural red bricks and emotional red bricks. Cultural red bricks are the stories — what story could we stop telling? That's a red brick. And emotional red bricks are the obligations you said yes to but now resent. You can recognise them by the energy you feel around them. If you said yes to something and now you're feeling resentful, that's probably a red brick worth examining.

ANDREA: Emotions as data. And if I process what I'm feeling, I can figure out what it's telling me — and maybe I renegotiate that thing I said yes to, or I don't say yes to it next time.

ANDREA: So maybe we can leave with this question today: what one red brick can you remove — today, or this week?

DONNA: That's it. What are we red bricking? I'm so curious.

ANDREA: Thank you for being here with me this morning. I've really enjoyed it. I appreciate you and your thinking. And if anyone has gotten curious about red bricking — here's the book. Not a sales pitch, but dive in if you're curious. Have a beautiful day.

DONNA: Thank you. And you.