Efficiency Is Bullshit, Actually
Efficiency gets a lot of praise, but most of it is wrong.
People think efficiency is an unalloyed good, something you always want to introduce.
Actually, that’s wrong. Here are some issues with efficiency, both the concept itself and how people use it.
It’s a thought-terminating cliche
Nearly all systems could become more efficient (more on what that exactly means later) in some facet. Of all the possible ways a thing could happen, almost never does it actually happen in the most efficient way possible.
So when you say “we can make it more efficient,” you’re spouting a truism, nothing more.
It’s not clear what kind people mean
Time efficiency? Monetary efficiency? Effort efficiency? All possible! But nobody ever specifies, even though there are many types of efficiency and they look different.
Lack of clarity allows for lazy thinking.
It’s not always beneficial
Efficiency (strictly, actually defined for your particular system) in one place may result in inefficiency in another place and ultimately hurt efficiency overall.
Readers of The Goal know that an optimal system is not just a combination of local optima: a single stage (that isn’t the bottleneck) on a factory line that now goes twice as fast just piles up unfinished parts, tying up working capital for no benefit and likely costing a lot to implement (new equipment, retraining).
It’s often a dead end
There are few $20 bills laying on the ground. If you could really make a thing more efficient, why hasn’t anyone else done it already? (This is not a rhetorical question! There are good answers. New technology in particular can actually make things more efficient.)
Chesterton’s Fence. If you change something without understanding why it was like that in the first place, you may find out the hard way.
Many solutions are actually tradeoffs. Time efficiency may hurt quality. Monetary efficiency may hurt speed. It’s rare to be far off the production-possibility frontier.
It’s fragile
Efficient = brittle
Inefficient = flexible
The human body has two kidneys, making it more flexible and robust. Engineers make airplane parts, bridges, etc with a “factor of safety” to withstand multiple times the expected stress, which entails more material and thus hurts efficiency (monetary and energy).
Not everything is or needs to be flexible! The point is the efficiency-flexibility tradeoff, which is usually invisible and not considered until circumstances change and the efficient thing breaks.
Next time you want to make something more “efficient”, try describing your plan without using the E word. If you can’t, look for other improvements instead.
