Culture

Efficiency Fallacy

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

“Efficiency” has been in the air a lot in the world of business, technology, and now government. I find this amusing because after 30 years in IT I’m more in the “keep hoping” mode on achieving real efficiency in organizations. Most people don’t think about what efficiency really is, but boy are they ready to try and achieve what they don’t understand.

The illusion is usually somewhere in a Daft Punk-esque dream of “better, faster, cheaper.” We will somehow achieve efficiency that means everything is of higher quality, gets to us faster, and costs less. When you put it that way, it starts to sound suspiciously like marketing and not actually a plan which is what a lot of efficiency efforts turn out to be.

See, sometimes efficiency as people conceive of it is actually not what they want. Yes, sometimes, better, faster, and cheaper is a terrible goal. However a lot of consultants, politicians, and marketers don’t want to admit it, and in many cases are too deliberately ignorant to understand it.

To illustrate this, let me give an example from computer code. Once I was working with a coder that was pulling their ever-thinning hair out over some legacy code that was incredibly brittle – simple modifications created cascading problems. Upon closer examination, the conclusion was a case of people being “efficient” – to stay on time they’d done all sorts of tricks of half-reusing code, ignoring good long-term choices for the easiest-to-code, and left us a mess.

Totally “efficient” and a total disaster to maintain and easy to break.

Something that works may not be the cheapest, or the fastest, or even the best. However it is reliable, consistent, enduring, and keeps going. You can save money, cut corners, overload what you’re doing but it will break. Efficiency is sometimes bad for actually getting good results because when you’re goal is to save time, money, or whatever you don’t ask will it work and keep working.

If you aim for better over some single-number driven measure of efficiency – more stable code, a better process, have higher standards for your company – you will probably get gains in efficiency anyway. Your company database not crashing saves money. Not having lawsuits due to better testing of a product is good. Efficiency sometimes comes from you know, doing things well.

I feel we’ve created a cult of efficiency in America. Maybe it’s also part of our weird health craze trends or a way to cope with economic differences. Perhaps it’s some malignant leftover part of the Protestant Work Ethic. But I think we’ve really overdone it because efficiency may not be what you want – or the only thing.

In closing, let me talk about another traumatizing event in my long career. A project I was assisting with once had employed a contractor who had software that gave answers perfectly. A quick test revealed they’d basically made software that could only past the test.

It was very efficient in its own way, and absolutely totally wrong.

Steven Savage

Where Are All The Superheroes?

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I’m always thinking about technology, culture, and organization, because it’s kind of my job. Pop culture falls under that purview because it tells us a lot about how we think – or what we don’t think about. Let’s take a break from my recent deep dives into something fun.

Let’s talk Superheroes.

I love superhero stories as they’re a kind of metagenre. Where else can an alien, a detective, and a half-goddess team up to fight a megalomaniacal billionaire? Superhero stories are a chance to tell tales where characters and genres collide. Despite the oversaturation in our media, I feel we haven’t really learned what we can do with superhero stories (which may be a separate column).

But one common element to superhero stories is transformation via trauma. A bad trip down an alley may inspire an orphan to become a caped avenger. An inventor’s efforts to deal with heart damage inspires an armored suit to fight evil. Lots of people get exposed to radiation and chemicals and magic and get powers. Mutants pop up in an evolving humanity, and an entire short-lived DC comics story dealt with humans put through a horrific obstacle courses so the few survivors would activate metahuman potential. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasters_(comics)

Trauma is a big part of superhero stories. Only, if that’s the case in a superhero setting, and said setting is a lot like ours, I’d expect a lot more superheroes.

Only one bereaved child decided to go on a crime-fighting crusade in a world of super-technology and succeeded?

How many traumatic deaths, how many wars and executions, would result in the deceased making deals with supernatural entities, or returning and spirits of vengeance, or whatever?

Shouldn’t there be a lot of inventors out there crafting all sorts of wild stuff that’s superhero-worthy? Wouldn’t startups be kind of a nightmare as every fifth person is secretly making a battlesuit instead of whatever useless product they’re working on.

With all the radiation, microplastics, and weird chemicals in our environment shouldn’t we have legions of mutants and superhumans? For that matter how many drugs (legal or illegal) might trigger superpowers? You go to the doctor, get a prescription, and discover that your cholesterol drug gives you super strength.

And that’s not dealing with aliens and supernatural creatures. But they’d probably notice the planet with so many costumed weirdos running around.

Most superhero tales have so much dense continuity, so many ideas slapped together, that the worlds they’re set in should be awash in superhumans. They’re just not because hey, then they’re not that distinct in a setting where they’re supposed to be distinct. Though My Hero Academia sort of goes there.

This issue of trauma, power, and transformation is something I think superhero stories can explore more. When power is accessible, or when the events that can lead one to develop it or seek it are common, what happens to the world? If you’re going to slam so many genres together, how long until there’s nothing recognizable in the world you’ve created?

Though, sadly, we probably won’t explore this as much for awhile. Superhero stuff seems a bit tapped out thanks to endless Marvel movies. But maybe at some point we’ll ask about power, causality, and what keeps a setting of superhumans from being overloaded – or perhaps asking what happens as it is . . .

Steven Savage

Thinking With Different Minds

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

As noted many times, I’m interested in history, especially the history of religion and project management. Fortunately my interest in such things has focused on China, which has a long history of written records, and preserved writings on management advice over a thousand years old. We Project Managers have been here forever, everyone needs some anal-retentive worrier who can’t stand to leave things undone.

You think you got canals and great temples without someone like me?

Often in my readings I find how much I relate to people a thousand, two thousand, or more years gone. The same observations, the same issues, the same human condition – and human solutions. There’s so much similar, to the point where I can read about some guy charting grain storage and go “yeah, my man, great job, you update those records, you keep that thing running!”

But among all those similarities, I’d like to talk about differences in how we organize, get things done, and indeed just live with each other.

Yes, I can relate to people thousands of years ago, but they also led different lifestyles than mine. They probably didn’t live thousands of miles away from their family. The seasons meant different things to them with less transport for food and different dwellings. The people I read of might pass by a slaughterhouse casually, or eat food that literally came from next door. They operated on different schedules. NONE of them had to learn what an “Influencer” was or become bitter about it.

They had different minds than me. Yes, we have much in common, but it’s important to remember the differences too.

When I think of this, I think how different we can be sometimes. Now that’s easy to think of the differences between people now and a few thousand years ago. In fact it’s probably good as a lot of us have ideas quite out of date that got handed down over the centuries we don’t question. But there’s more.

Do we have the same minds as someone born a hundred years earlier than us? Fifty? Even ten? How many of us are running around this world trying to interact with people who have different minds than we? How many of us haven’t adapted to the present? For that matter how many lessons are we trying to apply to our current crises that may not be old, but are from different times and different minds?

As we try to solve the problems we face, we may want to ask if we have the wrong minds to do it. If I can speculate on using Agile in pre-Industrial China, we can ask if we are literally the wrong people for the job of running and probably saving the world.

It’s OK. The world has changed a lot. We’ve done some very stupid things in hindsight. It’s OK to admit it. But we have to become different people and that means recognizing we need different minds.

We can reach back and time and learn from people different yet similar to us. We can ask who we need to be now. We can see who we used to be. We can become who we need to be, to have different minds.

Because I’m not sure current us is ready for the job, and we cling mightily to ourselves.

Steven Savage