Worshipping Efficiency

It is not the only approach

Early in my career, in my 20’s and 30’s, I bought in to the idea that “efficiency” was a noble goal. I would measure my self-worth by how much I produced in a day or a week. After those decades, I could no longer sleep through the whole night. My shoulder, neck, and jaw muscles were so tight I got daily headaches and tinnitus. Still, I still worked hard because that’s what I was supposed to do in the microculture I was in. I produced. I learned and explored. I wrote a book about how product teams can make time to develop cognitive empathy in an empirical way. The book showed how those teams make solutions that more people embrace. And then I started to learn why my body reacted to my production “efficiency.”

I began to realize that “efficiency” is only one way of approaching something. A few years later, I realized that “efficiency” became popular simply because certain business owners made it the foundation of their business measurements. The measurements start at the employee level and accumulate upward.

What is the focus of these popular business measurements?

• Efficiency: time, speed, shortcuts, going faster, maximizing output
• Cost: lowest cost, cutting costs, thinking of labor as cost
• Profit: growth year after year, maximize shareholder & owner value

But the above is not a healthy, complete list of measurements. Other successful businesses measure more. The following are a few of the additional measurements — you’ll recognize some of them.

• Return on Investment: the results of a trial or experiment, often described in terms of profit and several of the measurements below
• Errors: mistakes, injuries, recovery, mitigation, “slow is smooth, smooth is fast”
• Risk: finding out about potential outcomes for the org, for an informed decision
• Customer Outcomes: finding out how the org affects users, helps more people, investigates more than just mild harms (see harms scales), seeks to harm fewer people, looks at variety of approach & thinking styles (see mental model skyline)
• Worker Outcomes: making time for workers to live lives outside of work, hiring practices that give a broader range of people opportunity to earn, transparency of pay, promotions that provide paths to prosperity for more people, management practices that embrace variety, giving workers ability to override shareholder decisions, removing misconduct
• Environmental Sustainability: exploring potential harms to the environment, helping the planet, ecosystems, non-human beings, reversing past harms
• Resource Sustainability: regenerative practices, planning so that resources are not depleted (electricity, forest, ecosystems, metals, minerals, water, air, etc.)
• Community Responsibility: how the org supports or harms the people in geographic locations where they operate, how their supply chain affects communities where materials are sourced, how it contributes to local economies, how it engages in civic debate, how it helps to bring prosperity to a greater variety of people
• Brand Awareness: what is getting the org noticed (or helping its actions remain unnoticed)
• Brand Trust: potential for people to connect or transact with brand, potential for people to recommend brand, etc. (not the same as brand consistency)
• Innovativeness: capacity to think about future solutions that support to the other measurements here, careful experimentation

Here’s the first question:

What happens when an org focuses on efficiency, cost, and profit, without paying much attention to these other measurements? We have lots of examples unfolding now. Layoffs and worker burnout. Enormous accumulation of wealth in fewer hands. The feeling of precarity, financial and otherwise. For example, people are experiencing degrading “performance evaluations” after being pre-selected for layoff, then assigned a number of high priority tasks that are impossible to complete even in 80 hours a week. “Oh, you’re being laid off because of your poor performance.” All of this is incredibly damaging at a personal level.

Humanity has been here before. We’ve been here for most of our history together. We managed to make some progress in the past few decades, which means progress is possible. There are a few businesses who do measure themselves by the additional measurements listed above. They are not backing away from their approach.

Ironically, the very orgs focused mainly on efficiency, cost, and profit should see reduced efficiency and increased cost because of the mental, emotional, and spiritual depletion of the humans that they employ. Should. We have to make this happen. Maybe we can form groups within our orgs to find out the scores for these other business measurements listed above. We can compare scores with what groups in other orgs find. We can publicize it in a way that gives customers the ability to choose between offerings. Groups are our power.

The next question is:

What happens when that org is a government?