ConFigures

Efficiency, Heart, and Vision

Jack Vinson wrote about the limitations of a focus on efficiency in improving productivity yesterday, in response to Sigurd Rinde’s post on Competitiveness  and Efficiency. There’s almost a romance with efficiency in some arenas.  As detective Lord Peter (Wimsey) says in Dorothy Sayer’s Strong Poison, “When I die you will find ‘Efficiency’ written on my heart.”  This is especially so in business, but not just there  (see efficiency re sports discussion in the the Competitiveness article and comments) .

When I first read the Wimsey quote, it appealed to me powerfully, bundling up ideas of a clear mind, no wasted actions, and excellence in form and function in one word, “efficiency”.  I still think there’s a lot to be said for efficiency (I’m thinking of meetings years ago that went around and around and around with no goals and no action items, resulting in nothing but frustration and rapidly declining attendance).  However, efficiency isn’t everything, and efficiency-uber-alles can actually be harmful.  Over-engineering for efficiency (e.g., a determination to eliminate all redundancy) may engineer out flexibility and responsiveness, making a process fragile.  Moreover, an over-focus on efficiency can mire one down in incremental changes, distracting one from innovations with great potential for the Big Picture.  Not an exact analogy, but I’m reminded of all the work being done to improve web map performance (turnaround for users) before Google came along with a new idea for web maps (drag the map with the mouse!), making online maps much more exciting.