Nobody ever kills anything

There's a question I ask on my diagnostic intake that does more work than it suggests: what have you deliberately stopped doing in the last year?

The answer that comes back most often isn't a thing. It's a standard. "We stopped accepting mediocre work, even on the small stuff." It's said with pride, and the pride is absolutely earned. The company meant it, and the work did get better.

Read it as an operations answer rather than a culture answer, though, and it inverts. Raising a standard retires nothing. It adds. Every piece of work now has a higher bar to clear, which can mean another review pass, more rework, more senior time spent on things that used to ship at good-enough. It means that someone has to become the quality police. The company took on load and filed it under "stopped." That's the expensive trick in it: a standards raise pays out the emotional credit of an abandonment while delivering none of the relief. You feel lighter and your calendar gets heavier.

Peter Drucker named the thing they were reaching for and missed: planned abandonment. His test was blunt. For everything you currently do, ask, "if we weren't already doing this, would we start it today?" Where the answer is no, stop. Not trim, not deprioritize, not do-it-quarterly-instead. Take it off the list and tell people it's gone.

Companies skip this for a structural reason, not a character one. Adding is a decision one person can make in a moment, alone, and it resembles leadership. Stopping needs a reason, a defense, and someone willing to own it if the thing turns out to have actually mattered. So the list of what a company does moves in one direction only, while the people it lands on stay the same people. Nobody decided to overload them. Everybody decided to add one more good idea.

Here's what I find most telling. Companies that never plan an abandonment still abandon plenty. They just don't get to choose which. The choosing gets done under load, by the calendar, around four o'clock on a bad week.

One companyI work with wrote out its full recurring meeting list. The daily project scrums survive. The weekly status check-ins survive. The weekly management development session, the monthly per-department curation meeting where the next stretch of people's work would be planned... and half the 1:1s get pushed, then pushed again, then quietly stop appearing. The person who wrote the list flagged those three as the most valuable meetings on it.

That is an abandonment decision. Nobody made it. What survives under load is the meeting where another person is waiting on you, because cancelling it costs you an awkward conversation today. What dies is the meeting whose payoff is six months out and whose only stakeholder is one person's growth. Urgency wins because urgency is loud.

And it feeds itself. Development sessions are precisely what would make a team need less supervision. Cancel them and the team stays dependent. The dependence gets paid for in check-ins, course corrections, and questions that only leadership can answer, and those hours come out of the next development slot, which is the easiest thing on the calendar to move. Each turn of that loop tightens the next one. Name the loop and you can predict it.

So two little tweaks, both cheap, both about actively choosing the abandonment instead of receiving it.

The first is a standing abandonment hour, once a quarter, with a date on it in advance. List everything the company does on a recurring basis: meetings, reports, rituals, service lines, tools, the newsletter nobody reads. Ask Drucker's question of each one. The rule that makes the hour real is that it doesn't end until one genuine recurring commitment is retired, publicly, with a name attached to the decision. One is enough. Not a standards raise, not "we'll do less of that." An actual retirement, announced as a win, so that stopping something reads as competence rather than surrender. This assumes the company is genuinely over capacity; if it isn't, the hour becomes theater, and the tell is simple, nobody can say what the retirement freed up.

The second is to invert the cancellation rights on one meeting. Take the most valuable recurring session that keeps getting cancelled, and make it cancellable only by the person it exists to serve, never by the person running it. Move whatever status content can be written down into writing, so the surviving meetings stop being the only place information travels. This assumes those meetings die from lack of time rather than lack of substance. If they're being cancelled because nobody quite knows what to do in them, that's a content problem, and defending the slot will only produce a protected, awkward half hour.

The sign to watch for is near-term. Withina few weeks you should be able to point at one thing that is no longer on the list, and at one calendar slot with an unbroken attendance record. If the quarterly hour produces only standards raises and reshuffled priorities, it's being run by the same instinct it was designed to interrupt, and you'll know because the list will be exactly as long as it was in the spring.

The instinct behind "we stopped accepting mediocre work" is a good instinct. Someone was trying to say something true about the company becoming more serious about its craft. It just isn't a stop, and calling it one costs you the thing you actually needed, which is a shorter list.

Everything on that list was added by someone who thought it was a good idea, and most of them were right at the time. The question isn't whether it was a good idea then. It's what would happen if it quietly went away. And the next time the calendar makes that choice on your behalf, look at which meeting it picked. Its taste is remarkably consistent, and it isn't yours.