Why Chasing Efficiency Is Keeping Us Stuckifyed

The efficiency playbook was never built for the world we're in

"Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing." ~ Peter Drucker

These two words are so closely related that if you blink, you might miss that there's a difference. But in practice, on the ground, inside real organizations, with real teams, they mean very different things. And getting the order wrong has consequences.

The One Truth

For most of the twentieth century, efficiency was the goal, and it made sense. Repeatable processes with minimal error, performed at speed, that was the recipe for success in the Factory Age.

Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and organizations have modernized, but at their core, modern organizations still carry what they inherited from the Factory Age. The assumption that efficiency is always the goal, if we could just run leaner, move faster, cut more, the outcomes will get better.

Efficiency is great when we are working with repetitive tasks. When we do the same thing over and over, we get better at it. But most of the work we do today isn’t repetitive. The world today is contextual, constantly shifting, requiring judgment, adaptation, and constant recalibration.

Efficiency also requires a stable external environment. Think about the BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible) world we are living in today, where nothing is stable. When our work and our world are no longer well-suited to efficiency, what do we focus on instead?

The One Insight

The answer is effectiveness — doing the right thing. But in a BANI world, even that isn't as straightforward as it sounds. In the BANI World, the context shifts under our feet, sometimes daily. What worked last quarter may be irrelevant this quarter. The AI tool we built a workflow around got a major update. The priorities shifted. The market moved. Things move so quickly, we don’t have time to know if we are doing things right because often we won’t know until we’ve done it.

This is where the second part of that Peter Drucker quote comes into play.

The trap we fall into is that we keep chasing doing this right (efficiency) before we understand what the right thing we need to be doing is (effectiveness). What we also fail to realize is that when the context is always changing, efficiency starts to feel like an illusion we are chasing.

Here is a quick story to bring this to life. Some years ago, I was asked to consult on a project involving a contact center. They had just completed some process optimization work and were seeing some weird numbers. The agents with the highest customer ratings were performing the worst, according to the new dashboard. Before they moved to put these agents on performance management, they asked me to have a look, and I did. And what I discovered is that one of the key metrics for determining whether you were a strong performer was completing a call in less than 2 minutes. So, the “high performers” were working quickly to get through calls within the 2-minute timeframe, regardless of whether they actually helped the customer. The ones who were actually helping customers were taking 5-7 minutes per call. These so-called “low performers” were actually being effective while the “high performers” were being efficient. I’m pretty sure this isn’t unique to this specific contact center, but I like to use this example because it helps to show the difference between effectiveness and efficiency. And when you are dealing with non-repetitive tasks, effectiveness is what’s important.

When we are trying to be efficient, when the situation calls for effectiveness, we get Stuckifyed.

What makes the efficiency trap even harder to escape is that our brains are wired for it. Our brains have a preference for conserving energy, which means they are always looking for efficiencies. So, our brain wiring and the Factory Age inheritance organizations carry make escaping the efficiency trap challenging.

Insight into Action

We need to move to focusing on effectiveness - doing the right things. But in the BANI world, we often don’t know what the right things are until we’ve tried them, which requires shifting how we think about them. The right things are no longer permanently fixed actions; once we find them, they stick. What we need to do instead is experiment, continuously experiment to test, learn, and adjust.

So, in today’s work, being effective isn’t about having the right answers; it’s about the willingness to find good answers, and that requires being open to failing. This requires both a mindset shift at the individual level and a culture shift at the organizational level. But, ask you know by now, getting Unstuckifyed is all about building momentum quickly, so here is the one question you can use to start making this shift. Before leaping into action on a project or a decision, ask yourself, ask the team, are we being effective here or efficient? Which is more important right now?

That pause to ask the question and think about how you and your team are showing up, is a small step that will ignite a bigger shift.

Getting Unstuckifyed

In our current world, chasing efficiency is just sophisticated busyness. Reprioritizing effectiveness requires a mindset and cultural shift, but we don’t have to start big. We can start small by asking a question. Am I doing the right thing or just doing things right? And which matters more right now?

Remember, Effectiveness first. Efficiency will follow.

Till Next Time

The pursuit of efficiency isn’t wrong. It’s just been given a job it wasn’t designed to do in conditions it was never built for. In a world that won’t sit still, we have to be more effective more often than we’re efficient. And that starts with one honest question before we act.

Thanks for getting Unstuckifyed with me.

Dr Dani