Roisin Markham

The adage is Good Design is Subtractive. Stopping, subtracting, taking away an element is an important part of any change. It maybe the most under estimated thing in our capacity for change. Our vast consumer growth obsessed economy, businesses and western mindset bring our bias to add things first. What if in fact we just need to subtract. How often do we do that?

Our world (in my Irish EU Northern Hemisphere context) continues to spin things up and at us. Our culture driven by status demands expectations of “keeping up with the Jones” a promotion, being busy and pro-formative versions of ourselves that are hollow rewards for us. It underpins neo-liberal capitalism success.

The rise of LLM also know as AI or artificial intelligence is a demonstration of more bloating pushing and spin on growth.

I remember a Women in Tech Networking Walk in Dublin where the brilliant Mary Mulvihill told us stories of science and innovation as we walked in the lashing rain. She shared the story of a Dublin based design and print house that took away small circles of paper becoming the invention of perforations between stamps. My memory of that walk is vivid. I’d organised it with Mary as a way to bring academics, women in technology and science to meet each other and to support Mary’s walking tours. We walked across the city with 6 stopping story sites. Between these stories was an opportunity to meet others, relational movement and conversations. Mary was an extraordinary science communicator, a storyteller, she let me see Dublin with a different lens. I miss her, she died in 2015. Standing beside the railings on Nassau Street sharing what people invented, industrial forging, design that was new, different and shaped Dublin. Things that we now consider everyday but once were not.

This weeks themes included: rain, frost, sunsets, birdsong, dramatic clouds, soggy ground, reflections and a RETRO, two requests for quotes, time travel, futures literacy, the joy of collaboration and some planning. I’m approaching this year differently.

From my window I can see a blackbird tossing the ground looking for food. A family of blue tits patrol the hornbeam hedge, across the road in the old school house grounds two magpies bob. Our driveway has a lot of water sitting on it. The garden is soggy, the water table high again. Its been lashing. Our dogs are quietly curled up around me as I write.

As 2026 begins most people add things to their year, a blog from sometime last rear drifts though my mind it promoted the authors idea to stop doing something.

I was reminded, before we add anything we oft need to delete, stop or alter something. Client work this week doing a Retro, I used a lean agile approach rather than a rose, bud thorn, the subject of asking people to do more and what gets stopped was a theme. I relished it.

Stopping, ceasing in terms of business process management and cultural change chimes in with some other thinking about sufficiency.

Before we ask people to do more what are we going to stop doing so space can be made?

The Lean Agile Retro asks 4 basic questions in a quadrant style workshop its great and sufficient.

Getting a team or stakeholders in a room or digitally to respond to the four questions together all at once is effective; yielding good insights, conversations and perspectives. It can also tell you a lot about how a team or group works together. Revealing their communication style, relationships, power and group dynamics. People align and tell you what they really care about and in the same way what they don’t care about. As a facilitator you have to be paying attention to the non-verbal subtle cue. A hybrid situation for this sucks slightly because you have to adapt to this weird stilted mix of communication.

So what do we need to stop doing?

*I’m still not using LLM/AI to write my blog

Have a great week, let me know what you are going to stop doing.