What Could We Stop Doing?

From Elon Musk to Practical Deredundancy

“I reckon about 80% of that could go tomorrow and nobody would suffer.”

That was psychiatrist / philosopher Iain McGilchrist speaking about the “dead weight of bureaucracy” surrounding teachers, universities, hospitals and schools.

His suggestion was wonderfully provocative: look critically at the managerial and administrative superstructure and ask how much of it could simply disappear.

I immediately thought: Yes.

And then: Hang on. How would we actually know?

Because something can be frustrating, bureaucratic and apparently pointless while quietly carrying an important function.

And something can work perfectly well while no longer having any good reason to exist.

That distinction becomes particularly important as AI gives us extraordinary new powers to make existing systems faster and cheaper.

What if we’re about to become extremely good at optimising things that shouldn’t exist?

McGilchrist made the comment during a conversation with John Vervaeke and Daniel Schmachtenberger on the psychological drivers of the metacrisis.

Elon Musk and the other answer: delete it

There is another highly visible contemporary response to organisational complexity.

Delete things.

Elon Musk’s restructuring of Twitter/X and his later DOGE involvement brought an unusually aggressive version of organisational subtraction into public view.

Musk has explicitly described his engineering approach as beginning by questioning requirements and then trying to “delete the part or process,” arguing that people have a tendency to add things back rather than remove them.

There is something compelling about this.

Organisations accumulate.

Committees acquire subcommittees. Temporary procedures become permanent. Reporting requirements generate further reporting requirements. Systems built to solve yesterday’s problems remain long after their originating conditions have changed.

Sometimes nobody can quite remember why something exists.

But Musk’s approach also makes the inverse problem unusually visible.

Deletion is not proof of redundancy.

A department might look expendable until its absence reveals a dependency nobody had noticed.

A procedure might appear bureaucratic until something goes wrong and we discover that it was carrying accountability.

Apparently duplicated expertise might actually provide resilience.

Spare capacity might look inefficient precisely until the moment it is needed.

So we have at least two tempting responses to cumbersome systems:

Optimise them.

Or:

Delete them.

Neither, by itself, answers the harder question:

What can genuinely disappear without destroying something consequential?

We already have a substantial vocabulary for this

I started looking around.

Unsurprisingly, organisations have been trying to remove unnecessary complexity for a very long time.

There is already an extensive neighbouring vocabulary.

Approach	What it typically seeks to achieve	A question it may leave unresolved
Process simplification	Reduce unnecessary steps and complexity	Does the process itself still need to exist?
Lean management	Eliminate waste and improve value delivery	Who determines what counts as value?
Delayering	Remove management layers and shorten decision pathways	What judgement, coordination or accountability were those layers carrying?
Administrative burden reduction	Reduce paperwork, reporting and compliance costs	Which apparent burdens protect something consequential?
Business process reengineering	Radically redesign workflows for improved performance	Are we redesigning around purposes that still warrant pursuit?
Organisational rationalisation	Consolidate overlapping functions, systems or resources	Is apparent duplication actually carrying resilience or independent judgement?
Cost cutting	Reduce expenditure	What capabilities disappear alongside the costs?
Automation	Transfer tasks from humans to technological systems	Should those tasks continue to exist at all?
Subtractive redesign	Improve something by removing rather than continually adding	By what criterion do we determine that a subtraction is beneficial?
Purpose-preserving simplification	Remove unnecessary activity while protecting essential function	What if the inherited purpose itself needs reconsideration?

This isn’t an argument that these disciplines never ask such questions.

Sophisticated practitioners certainly do.

The third column is deliberately phrased as a question each approach may leave unresolved.

But putting them alongside one another helped me see the problem more clearly.

We can simplify a process.

We can remove organisational layers.

We can eliminate waste.

We can automate tasks.

We can redesign workflows.

We can even become extremely good at preserving the purpose of an institution while radically simplifying how that purpose is accomplished.

And still not ask:

Why does this purpose appear necessary in the first place?

This is where I encountered Practical Deredundancy

Dr Leon Tsvasman uses the term Practical Deredundancy. https://leontsvasmansapiognosis.substack.com/p/before-you-automate-it-prove-it-should?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=3aclg

When I first began exploring his idea, I translated it into something I could readily understand:

Remove unnecessary mediation while preserving consequential function.

Or perhaps:

Purpose-preserving simplification.

That seemed pretty good to me.

Leon corrected me. 😂

Because the more radical implication of deredundancy is that the purpose itself cannot automatically be exempted from examination.

A procedure may efficiently perform a function.

That function may successfully serve a purpose.

And that purpose may be an inherited response to conditions that no longer exist.

So we can follow the chain further:

PROCESS → FUNCTION → PURPOSE → CRITERION → CONDITIONS

At each level we can ask:

Why is this necessary?

And eventually we may discover that something we have been treating as an unavoidable organisational necessity is actually a consequence of conditions that could themselves be changed.

That is a very different proposition from:

How can we do this more efficiently?

It is also different from:

What can we cut?

AI makes this question urgent

This is where Practical Deredundancy became particularly interesting to me.

Because AI is astonishingly good at helping us perform existing activities differently.

A reporting burden consumes enormous staff time?

Automate the report.

A compliance process requires repetitive checking?

Build an agent.

A meeting generates administrative work?

Summarise it automatically.

An organisation produces huge quantities of documentation?

Let AI produce it faster.

All potentially useful.

But there is a prior question:

Should this activity still be necessary at all?

Leon put the danger wonderfully:

“Otherwise AI might merely make obsolete institutions cheaper to maintain.”

That stopped me.

Because efficiency cannot tell us whether something warrants continuation.

A perfectly functioning system can be perfectly redundant.

But we shouldn’t simply start deleting things either

This is where McGilchrist’s provocative 80% becomes difficult in practice.

Imagine walking into a university and announcing:

Right! Which 80% are we deleting?

😬

How do we know?

Something that looks redundant from the standpoint of present performance might carry:

accountability, institutional memory, resilience, judgement, corrigibility, exploratory capacity or unrealised possibility.

This particularly matters because organisations often contain deliberate redundancy.

Two people knowing how to perform a critical function might look inefficient — until one leaves.

Unused capacity might look wasteful — until circumstances change.

A human checkpoint might look slower than automation — until an unusual case requires judgement that the automated system cannot exercise.

And experimentation is almost definitionally inefficient if measured only against today’s outputs.

So Practical Deredundancy cannot simply mean less.

Nor does it mean preserving everything that currently serves some identifiable purpose.

The harder inquiry is:

Which necessities could cease to be necessities at all — without diminishing our capacity to originate, revise and answer for consequential decisions?

And then comes the question I find most exciting:

What new human possibilities might become available as a result?

That changes the emotional character of the inquiry.

We’re no longer merely hunting for waste.

We’re asking what all this organisational machinery is preventing people from having the capacity to do.

I want to test this in the real world

This is where my own role begins.

I am not claiming to have developed another organisational efficiency methodology.

I haven’t.

I’m interested in finding out what happens when Tsvasman’s research architecture encounters a real inherited organisational necessity.

So I am developing a small Practical Deredundancy pilot.

I am looking for one or two organisations willing to bring a substantive process, practice or administrative burden whose necessity can be examined without reducing the inquiry to cost-cutting.

We might begin with deceptively simple questions:

What is this process actually doing?

What does it preserve?

What would disappear if we removed it?

What conditions made it necessary?

Do those conditions still exist?

What criterion makes this activity appear necessary?

Could we change the conditions so that the necessity itself disappears?

And:

What human possibility might become available if it did?

Perhaps we discover that the process really is necessary.

Perhaps we discover that part of it is carrying something nobody realised.

Perhaps we discover that we’re automating an activity we shouldn’t be doing.

Or perhaps we discover that the most interesting intervention isn’t changing the process at all.

It is changing the conditions that made the process necessary.

That’s what I want to find out.

---

Practical Deredundancy is grounded in the research architecture developed by Dr Leon Tsvasman. I am independently developing and testing an application and facilitation layer for real organisational cases.

If you have responsibility for an inherited organisational practice whose necessity deserves serious examination, I’d be interested in hearing from you.

The Tender Heart-Mind Gathering: Cultivating Conditions for Genuine Encounter

An experiment in participatory hospitality, beauty, belonging and the art of gathering across difference.

On 7 August 2026, I hosted my first Tender Heart-Mind Gathering at Hill Street Yoga Studio in Port Elliot, South Australia.

Two months later, I’m still trying to understand what I did. 🤣

People asked me afterwards, “What gave you this idea? What sparked it?”

The funny thing is, I had tried to explain it in my invitation and at the event. I even listed the three books that had profoundly shaped my thinking!

But the gathering actually emerged from many streams of my life converging.

I had been exploring my family history and reflecting on social polarisation. I had attended a neighbour’s bonfire.

And suddenly, it just all cohered into this experiment, Wisdom for Society’s Fourth Turning.

Three Books and a Long Horizon

Three books particularly shaped my intention:

• Possible: How We Survive (and Thrive) in an Age of Conflict — William Ury
• High Conflict: How We Get Trapped and How We Get Out — Amanda Ripley
• How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen — David Brooks

William Ury tells a story about bringing politicians from opposing sides together in a place of extraordinary natural beauty.

They weren’t there to negotiate legislation or force agreement.

Nothing particularly dramatic happened.

Yet much later, two women from opposing political camps who had met there found themselves collaborating successfully on an issue they both cared about.

That story became something of a compass for me.

What if we stopped demanding immediate outcomes from every encounter?

What if we cultivated relationships whose significance might not become apparent for months or years?

Amanda Ripley challenges us to complicate the narratives through which we divide people into “us” and “them”.

David Brooks invites us to see people deeply, rather than prematurely reducing them to labels, categories or personality types.

I began wondering what these ideas might look like as a lived experience.

Deliberately Gathering Across Silos

I wanted to bring together people who might not ordinarily meet.

So I invited people from different worlds: New Age spirituality, Christianity, business, migrants, civic leadership and politics.

I deliberately invited politicians from across the political spectrum.

My hope was that they might enter the gathering not primarily as politicians, defending positions or representing constituencies, but as human beings.

People with stories, hopes, disappointments, contradictions and longings.

None of the politicians I invited attended, but the invitations themselves opened unexpected doors.

A mayoral candidate saw my advertisement, connected with me, and subsequently met me for coffee.

Through the invitation process, I also connected with an Aboriginal leader for the first time.

These were meaningful encounters arising even before the gathering began.

And among those who did attend, we heard extraordinary stories from migrants and business owners — stories that might never have surfaced in an ordinary networking event.

I wanted to create conditions in which we could encounter one another beyond the roles and categories that so often define our interactions.

The Invitation Was Already an Encounter

Something unexpected happened before the gathering even began.

One person who couldn’t come wrote to me:

“Thank you for sending your courageous community offering through. I first felt how brave you are to embark on this journey on bringing people together…”

They went on to describe their own frustration with the difficulty of finding genuine community connection, recognising it as a wider condition of our culture.

I began to realise that the gathering was not confined to two hours in a room.

The invitation itself was part of the work.

It was an act of reaching across familiar boundaries, opening a possibility without knowing whether anyone would accept it.

Deliberately Feminine

The physical design and place of the gathering mattered.

I arranged a circle with a mandala at its centre.

I had learned about feminine circle facilitation through Yasmin of Path of the Rose and Rachael Rose, whose work had influenced my approach.

The circle was not merely an aesthetic choice.

I wanted to create a different atmosphere from the conventional arrangements of conferences, business meetings or public debates.

There was no podium separating the speaker from the audience.

No panel of experts whose authority determined the direction of every conversation.

Instead, I wanted to invite presence, listening, contribution and the possibility of something emerging between us.

I paid attention to the energy of the location, the people I invited, the atmosphere, and the relational field we might cultivate together.

This is part of what I understand as curatorial hospitality.

It involves intentional design without attempting to control everything that happens.

I wanted to experiment with a different way of being together.

Music, Cacao, Story and the Feeling of Home

I sang segments of three songs during the gathering.

One was the Chinese song Cheng Du (成都), which evokes memories of place, attachment and the feeling of home.

As a Malaysian migrant who has made Australia my home, this theme is deeply personal.

What makes a place home?

Is it where we were born? Where our ancestors lived? Where we are known? Where we find people who recognise us?

Music allows us to enter these questions differently from intellectual discussion.

We also shared cacao and story through Seven Flowers Alchemy Cacao, whose founder brought his own experience of migration from Mexico.

The songs, cacao, stories and conversation were not simply separate items on an event programme.

They were part of the conditions I was trying to create.

Invitations into memory, beauty, presence and human encounter.

I didn’t want to deliver a polished performance to passive consumers.

I wanted people to participate in shaping the experience through their own presence and contributions.

Not Ticketed. Not Networking.

I deliberately chose not to sell tickets.

Instead, I shared my personal investment in bringing the gathering into being and invited people to contribute generously.

This was another experiment.

Could we make the real costs of hosting visible without the expected conventional commercial transaction?

Could generosity and shared responsibility become part of the experience?

I don’t yet know whether this model is sustainable, but I wanted to explore it.

Nor was the gathering intended as networking.

Networking often begins with what we do, whom we know, and what we might offer one another.

I was interested in something different.

What happens when we meet people without immediately asking what use we might be to each other?

What if we allow ourselves to be surprised by the person in front of us?

What Actually Emerged?

I think I cultivated a diverse field of people who might otherwise never have encountered one another, at depth.

But I cannot claim authorship over what they shared.

Their stories belonged to them.

My contribution was to bring together the people, place, atmosphere and invitations that made those stories possible.

What becomes of those encounters remains to be seen.

And perhaps that is precisely the nature of long-horizon work.

We may never know which conversations become tomorrow’s collaborations.

The Path of the Rose in Politics

It was only after the gathering that I began reflecting on what I called The Path of the Rose in Politics.

The name drew upon the feminine circle traditions I had encountered through Yasmin and Rachael Rose.

But the substance was already present before the event.

I had deliberately invited people across political and social divides. I had designed a circle. I had hoped to create a space where people could be more than their institutional or ideological identities.

Only afterwards did I find language that brought these strands together.

I began imagining gatherings modelled on this one taking place across Australia.

Not identical programmes imposed on different communities, but gatherings shaped by their own people, places and histories.

Could this approach contribute something to our public life?

Could we cultivate the relational conditions that make disagreement more humane, understanding more possible, and collaboration less dependent on shared ideology?

I don’t imagine that gathering in a circle will magically resolve political conflict.

Nor should tenderness require us to abandon conviction, moral discernment or difficult truths.

But perhaps there is room for another kind of political imagination.

One that begins with the possibility of genuinely meeting the person with whom we disagree.

The Art of Creating Conditions

More recently, I encountered Dr Leon Tsvasman’s reflections on KUNSTFLOW, an artistic experiment he developed over approximately a decade in Germany.

His account resonated deeply with me.

KUNSTFLOW explored how artistic and social conditions could be curated to allow unexpected creative possibilities to emerge.

My Tender Heart-Mind experiment has a different emphasis.

I am particularly interested in relational emergence — what becomes possible between people when the conditions for genuine encounter are cultivated.

I find a similar orientation appearing in my emerging work as the Fleurieu Fairy.

Through music, storytelling, enchantment and hospitality, I am exploring how to create spaces where people might encounter beauty, wonder, themselves and one another.

Sometimes the most important thing an artist creates may not be a finished product.

It may be the conditions in which something unexpected becomes possible.

Where to From Here?

I don’t know when I’ll host another Tender Heart-Mind Gathering.

My life as a homeschooling mother in a neurodivergent family involves real constraints. I am also still exploring how to make my creative and community work financially sustainable.

I am interested in gatherings that are genuinely participatory, responsive to place and people, and open to outcomes nobody could have prescribed in advance.

Perhaps Tender Heart-Mind will become a series of gatherings across Australia.

Perhaps its principles will find expression in my hospitality activation work.

Perhaps something else will emerge.

For now, I’m grateful that I followed the impulse to begin.

Gather people. Share beauty. Listen well. Make room for stories. Allow imagination to reawaken.

And see what becomes possible.

🌹

Jasmine Yow | The Fleurieu Fairy

An experiment in hospitality, human encounter and the art of becoming.

On Newborns and Grace

It is a cool breezy morning. I walk past the hospital lawns to get to my antenatal appointment, about 30 weeks pregnant.

On a similar autumn morning two years ago, I had sat on the very same lawn in tears, after a night of the uncomfortable balloon catheter and a failed attempt to break my waters, 24 hours before Harrison was born.

Looking up from the lawns, I can see the window of his birthing suite. What a special place full of intense memories.

I have just received a text from a friend that she is rolling into theatre right now in this very same building. She is about to meet her twin babies today, and I cannot contain my excitement for her.

I walk past newborns and birthing suites to get to my appointment room. I cry every time I see a newborn lately, so I know I’m in the third trimester getting ready to meet my baby!

New life fills us with so much awe and wonder and gratitude. I’m feeling again, for the first time since Harry’s birth, an overwhelming sense of how much of a gift life is, how fragile and utterly dependent a tiny baby is, and how much love and nurture they need.

Those feelings sustained me through the first months of motherhood, and I remember them spilling over to my stepson, even though I did not birth him or know him as a baby.

Now my thoughts are turning to my next baby the way I had thought about Harry before he was born.

With her, I have two extra years of experience as a mother. My first pregnancy was a roller coaster of emotions and worry about my changing family structure, but this time it is hardly a blip on the radar. I have had two more years of struggle and hopefully wisdom as a mum, and out of that comes the naming of my baby with what’s moved my heart most deeply lately: grace.

It came from a book I read: Parenting by Paul David Tripp. The grace-laden e-pages were like waves that washed over me, soothing the frustrations and anger over difficult and disobedient behaviour.

“I need more of this in my parenting!” My heart cried. It cried for all the times I am not like this to my kid/s (it gets harder as they get older :P). It softened my heart to have more mercy…instead of calling every single bad behaviour to account because I want my orders obeyed.

I don’t know how to capture it for you here, except to say the book presented a perspective that didn’t demand more perfection from me, or the kids. It seemed to be a recipe for more patient and joyful parenting. It focused on how we are all works in progress in the loving arms of a heavenly father — a perspective I think all can share regardless of religion.

I quote from a book review (because I am running out of child free time!) the essence of what moved my heart:

“Children need compassion, understanding, patience, acceptance, forgiveness, grace more than criticism, judgment, condemnation, punishment (although they need authority, rules, enforcement, accountability).

Don’t settle for winning the battle over the behavior; fight for heart behind the behavior.

Move towards children with grace of forgiveness, wisdom, correction, rescue; don’t give way to irritation, frustration, impatience, discouragement.”

When our baby is born in May, we will most likely call her Gracie. I hope I will always be able to draw on the magical feeling of holding our new baby, to remember that our children (and any other children we get the privilege of caring for now and in the future) are priceless treasures.

May her name always remind me of the way of grace, and our home life abound with it even in chaotic desperate times…when laundry and lunches have once again cluttered the clarity of vision I have in this quiet moment.

2020: On wealth, parenting & gratitude

Reflecting on our new trading venture this year, we both haven’t been very driven to make it big. Granted, we both have other commitments taking up our focus and energy, but when we explored the whys, a reason we identified is that we are comfortable with where we are at and are not fueled by a big desire to succeed at trading.

This led me to revisit one of the big questions: what is my WHY that energises me?

Last night, Harry and I read our new Wiggles book on feelings (picked up for free from our Buy Nothing community!), and he learnt how to say “happy” and “sad”. He was so proud of himself, he kept opening his eyes to practise those words while nursing to sleep.

Despite feeling generally drained and tired, I noticed that this gave me the excitement and motivation to seize and build on his learning. So I made & stuck up a bilingual feelings flashcard at his table – I was really energised to do this, but I can’t say the same of every other mothering duty!

Motherhood comes with many opportunities for self discovery, and the above is a clue for me as I continue to seek purpose and direction. I get huge satisfaction from helping and seeing people learn & grow – regardless of whether they are my children. I truly get excited!

I think that is a part of my personality/character that has also given me drive in stepmotherhood, and made nurturing children an “easier” job. I am realising that every mother/stepmother has a unique makeup that makes some aspects of parenting easier or harder for them.

To further illustrate from my own example, I’ve realised my anxious tendency to preempt and PREVENT (instead of fix) problems tends to cause me to subconsciously interfere with my children’s days more than I need to. Before Harrison has totally (or even slightly, haha) got to my tiredness, I’ve already whipped out the iPad so I get 30 minutes of peace, instead of giving him ideas to go play with his other toys alone. The latter definitely sounds more ideal to me, but in many ways I easily fall back to my former comfortable problem-solving mechanism. You can never escape yourself, even (or especially) in parenting!

Still, back to trading…as of today, the growth in our crypto portfolio has exceeded the income I would have brought in going back to work. This is a confronting reality for me as someone still practising her new wealth mindset. It is not strictly comparable as growth does not equal cashflow, but to think my wealth grew with me doing LESS, not more, cements my new beliefs which delinks the strict correlation of time/effort and money.

My last reflection is on gratitude. One of the most memorable books I read this year is Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts. It is about intentionally looking at & giving thanks for the graces in your life.

Awhile ago a neighbour commented that I must have lots of friends as she sees many people come in and out of my house. It is funny that I had the exact same thought about her, and the wonderful supportive community I imagine she has! 😂

In our struggles (which are not to be belittled), it’s easy to look longingly from the outside into an imaginary picture of other people’s lives…things you wish you had or were. But what a pity if it dims our eyes to all the good things we do enjoy.

The incident turned my attention to gratitude…all the good things in my life.

We are in a situation now where I CAN be a stay home mum, something we couldn’t imagine financially when Harry was born. We are expecting a baby girl (with 90% certainty the ultrasound technician said) in May — all of Chris’ dreams come true at once. (It is challenging to wonder if my daughter will take after me…)

I am also grateful for opportunities to welcome other children (friends and students) into my home. It is a funny thing to say — for all the joys they bring, I am often tired and frazzled, at times lost in exhaustion wondering “who am I and what is left?”, but I tend to come back to the same answers…

…if I’ve made a difference in a life, beneath everything else, that’s what really matters to me and brings me deep joy that bubbles over.