March 2026:

Advice is great, right? We all seek personal and professional guidance on ways to improve. Unfortunately, the vast majority of advice, on any topic, tends to promote additive thinking and actions, offering us more ways to think and act.  It rarely helps us understand what we should stop or continue thinking and doing. Implementing guidance additively can result in:

• Complexity – as we layer new on top of old.

• Confusion – due to an inability to reconcile the now hybrid combination.

• Disappointment – when outcomes fall short of expectations.

This is a root cause for why we often deem seemingly sage advice as useless. What is needed is an elegantly simple yet effective framework for adopting new ways of thinking and acting.

Knowing Why to Stop, Start, Continue: “Perhaps the way to win in the age of excess everything is simply to learn to get out of our own way” (May 2012).

The stop, start, continue (SSC) framework is attributed to Dr. Philip Daniels and was originally used as a periodic feedback mechanism to improve individual performance and team collaboration. MORe recommends adopting the SSC framework at an organizational level for its value as a highly effective diagnostic and improvement tool. It is best used continuously or during especially critical moments of change, such as creation, growth, or problem-solving. The framework’s substance and sequence are equally important. Stop should be given the highest level of priority and time, as, beyond its ability to address additive outcomes, it is the most commonly skipped, underestimated, and/or underappreciated step in any change initiative.

As the initiating action, stop reminds us to slow down and temporarily pause our human instincts to add, accumulate, hoard, and store (Govindarajan et al. 2025; May 2012). Humans are in need of constant order, which we quickly impose if not immediately sensed (May 2012). This is why pausing for thoughtful reflection is a key element in other noteworthy frameworks (Growth Mindset, Critical Thinking System 2, Thought-Feeling-Behavior loops, and Steven Covey’s habit to first seek to understand before being understood). Pausing provides an opportunity to reflect on the whole organization, the system, to identify stop, start, continue ideas.

Stop then involves the actual elimination of negative thoughts and actions. Removing just the right things in just the right way can help to create a path through the haze, provide clarity from complexity, and win the war of excess (May 2012). The most effective way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction (Maeda 2006). Subtraction is strategic, and the courage to do it is a competitive differentiator (Govindarajan et al. 2025). Failing to remove excess has real consequences.

An example of these consequences was the fad of business process reengineering (BPR) initiatives in the 1990s. Michael Hammer’s article “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate” triggered a decade of BPR efforts that failed more than 70% of the time (1990). Hammer clearly and rigorously called out structural elements as a key contributor to process issues. However, a thorough review did not surface any BPR methodologies that addressed these issues. MORe’s research contends that the failure to stop the negative structural effects Hammer identified as part of reengineering contributed to the high failure rates.

Recommendations: Knowing how to utilize the SSC framework is just as important as the framework itself, with the sequence below being a critical factor for success. Recall that the mantra behind this framework is thoughtful consideration and action, so this is not a moment for quick fixes or low-hanging fruit. These ways of thinking are part of the problem and should stop. Iterative diagnostic and improvement cycles should involve:

• Stop. Stop precedes start for two important reasons. It eliminates negative effects that will undermine all further improvements (e.g., BPR), and more importantly, it generates positive energy, enthusiasm, and support for continued change among employees following removal of the undesirable. Stop is about making intellectual, emotional, and physical space for what will be started or continued. It is about creating a healthier environment with which to build a new foundation. Common areas of excess to explore and possibly stop include:

  • Mental models (management makes all decisions; the boss is always right).

  • Assumptions (front-line workers can’t be trusted; people have to be told what to do).

  • Structure (tall hierarchies, excessive specialization, complex matrices).

  • People (performance management tools, misaligned incentive systems, rigid policies).

  • Process (cross-functional execution; ridged, inefficient, or ineffective workflow).

  • Technology (large COTS applications, redundant systems, excessive controls).

• Start. Once the negative elements have been stopped, starting innovative new practices becomes feasible with a greater chance of taking hold. Common areas to explore and possibly start include:

  • Simplified, employee-centric replacements for any of the stopped elements above.

  • Decision-making (allowing employees more authority).

  • Autonomy (empowering employees with freedoms to select how and what they work on).

  • Innovation (time, space, funds, and psychological safety for employees to experiment).

  • Communications (fluid and mutually respectful feedback loops between all elements).

• Continue. Prior to carrying forward elements previously identified as positive, reevaluate whether they are still contextually relevant and optimized to support the new environment. Allow emergent ideas and outcomes from the stop-start process to inform the continue process. It is more important to preserve the essence or outcomes of the continue items, as opposed to their literal implementations.

The SSC framework presents effective ways to enhance diagnostic and improvement methods while also encouraging continuous efforts toward the removal of complexity and rigidity in favor of simplicity and resilience. Investing in thoughtful consideration and action, especially as part of stop, will reap meaningful rewards during moments of creation, change, growth, or problem-solving.

Stay tuned for MORe insights and recommendations.