Subtract the work that shouldn't exist.
You can't deploy agents against work that shouldn't be done at all. Phase 1 names the zombie work, kills it, and frees the room to act.
Most AI rollouts fail because they automate the wrong work. Kill List goes first because subtraction outranks addition.
The default response to a productivity problem is to add tools. Add a meeting. Add a tracker. Add a dashboard. Add an AI. Every addition demands coordination, and coordination is the tax that ate the productivity in the first place.
Kill List inverts that instinct. For 30 days, the work of the team is to name the work that shouldn't exist. Recurring meetings nobody can defend. Reports nobody reads. Approval chains that exist because of a problem from 2019. The zombie work that survives because no one is paid to kill it.
At the end of Phase 1 you have two artifacts: a quantified coordination tax on the P&L, and a named vital few — the work that, if done well, makes the rest of the work matter. The Agentic Pilot in Phase 2 only deploys against the vital few. Everything else gets a tombstone.
Read these in order before you run the Phase 1 working session.
The hidden cost of every meeting, status update, and approval chain. How to quantify what's already on your P&L.
Read the article →Why human beings systematically miss subtractive solutions, and how to design the system that catches them anyway.
Read the article →How to name the work that survives audit and the work that doesn't. The 80/20 made operational for AI-era teams.
Read the article →Phase 1 lands differently from each seat at the leadership table.
Decision-rights live inside coordination work. When the work goes, the decision returns to the seat that should have always held it. The Kill List is how you find out which decisions you've been outsourcing to meetings without realizing it — and reclaim the leadership time the next 60 days demand.
You're paying for the meetings whether anyone benefits or not. Phase 1 produces a defensible number — hours times burden rate times frequency — for the work that nobody asked for and nobody can defend. That number is the floor of Phase 2's ROI case.
78% of CHROs say workflows and roles must change. Frontline managers are the throughput layer, and they're drowning in work the company keeps adding and never removing. Kill List is the first signal you've ever sent that says: we're going to subtract before we add.
The Kill List Playbook is the working session in PDF form. Free.
Step-by-step instructions, the audit template, the burden-rate worksheet, and the executive memo you send before the first session. Twenty pages, branded, ready to print.
The Readiness Score tells you whether Kill List is your right starting point — or whether you're already past it.