thanks to Mitch Kapor, I caught this New York Times story about Obama’s stimulus plan where they said – “He will also designate a chief performance officer and a chief technology officer on Wednesday to help make government more efficient, they said.”
Efficiency is part of the problem in our thinking. This is why we are not sustainable as a civilization, efficiency is not what is important – what we need is effectiveness. What we need is to be resilient. We need to have the ability to respond to massive change. Efficiency destroys resilience, whereas effectiveness is all about resilience. As Dave Pollard says
The efficiency comes at a cost of quality, service, attention, and care. These corporations reduce us from people to mere consumers, and they are driven to push us to buy more and more, of the same stuff everyone else buys, and reduce us to automatons who, as my friend Jerry Michalski famously put it, become merely “gullets who live only to gulp products and crap cash.
…
Resilience and sustainability, because of Natural Enterprises’ superior improvisational capacity and focus on customers’ evolving needs and effectiveness rather than “efficiency”; they won’t leave town or suddenly go broke when economic or market conditions change
Tis all about thinking like a swarm.
Visualize a net. (tis also all about visual thinking rather than verbal) An efficient net is one that is pulled taught. There is no slack between the nodes. If the situation changes then it is not able to respond. A resilient net is one with slack between the nodes, where there is spare capacity to respond to changes in the situation. Resilience is better than efficiency.
Efficiency is related to the measure of output, effectiveness is related to the measure of outcome…
Efficiency destroys resilience. Resilience is a good thing. Efficiency means utilizing excess capacity, resilience requires excess capacity to respond to novelty.
Only resilient systems can be responsive and agile.
And I think agile is a very good thing. Especially given the turbulent nature of the greater system.
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