Three drills: cross out everything you track that would not break if ignored for ninety days, ask whether your successor would care about this in year one, and follow a decision past its first-order effect. Each one asks you to stop doing something you are currently being credited for, and that is what makes them harder than they look.
The answer, in one line
Write down everything you track each week, then cross out anything that would not break if ignored for ninety days. What survives is usually a small fraction.
Definition#
The altitude toolkit: three practices for Big Picture Thinking. The subtraction drill removes what is tracked but not used. The successor test exposes rituals that serve comfort. The cascade question follows consequences past the first order.
1. The subtraction drill#
Write down everything you track each week. Cross out anything that would not break if ignored for ninety days. Keep the three that matter. Everything else is a cognitive tax being paid for no return.
The book's illustration is an investor with two hundred metrics across a portfolio who, asked which numbers had changed a decision in the last three months, circled three. The rest was theatre. The drill's own failure condition is stated as a rule: if nothing gets removed, you are managing noise rather than strategy.
This becomes sharper as reporting gets cheaper. A dashboard that costs nothing to extend will be extended, and the cost of the additional metric falls on attention rather than on budget, where nobody is counting it.
2. The successor test#
We build rituals that once served progress and now serve comfort, and they are close to invisible to whoever performs them. The simplest way to expose them is to borrow the eyes of a replacement: would your successor care about this in year one?
The book's example is a handover folder of nineteen critical reports, of which the successor still used two three months later. What endures beyond your ownership is the work. The rest is motion, and motion is what gets reported.
3. The cascade question#
Altitude is measured in consequences rather than activity, and most teams stop at first-order logic: launch the feature, gain the users, grow the revenue. Every effect has an echo, and the echo is where the interesting part lives.
The drill is to follow a decision two steps further than feels necessary and name what each step does to somebody. It is the same move as the Zoom Through Time filter applied to a single decision rather than to a trend, and it connects to the fourth receipt at Hand, Head, Hours, Heart: the second and third order effects are usually where the people who never enter the system as data are standing.
Why these three sit together#
Each removes something. The subtraction drill removes metrics, the successor test removes rituals, the cascade question removes the comfort of stopping at the first consequence. Big Picture Thinking is generally sold as addition, more context and more connection, and the practice turns out to be mostly subtraction.
What this has not been shown to do#
None of the three has been tested. The illustrations are individual cases reported from practice, not evidence about rates, and nothing here establishes that teams who run these drills make better decisions. The subtraction drill in particular has an obvious failure mode, which is removing a metric that turns out to have been the early warning for something, and the ninety-day test does not protect against it.
Source#
Rahim Hirji, SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI, Kogan Page, 2026, chapter three.
Related SuperSkills research#
Essay · SS-2026-335
Hirji, R. (2026). The altitude toolkit. The SuperSkills evidence base, SS-2026-335. https://thesuperskills.com/research/the-altitude-toolkit. Last reviewed 26 September 2026.
An evidence review by Rahim Hirji, not peer-reviewed research. For a material claim, cite the underlying study as well; every study here carries its own permanent link.
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