Efficiency – What Is the Metric?

If more things get done in less time, it is surely efficiency. But is that all there is to it?

The "problem-solving department" of our brain (the prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex) is remarkably hardworking. Give it a task and it will relentlessly start working on it. We usually describe the task like this:

• It takes me too much time.
• It is inconvenient to do.
• I keep forgetting to do this.
• I have to double-check it many times.

The brain's problem-solving department takes these descriptions and reformulates them into an actionable question: "How can I get more things done in less time?"

In itself, this is not a bad question. But it contains the same issue present in many time-management teachings: instead of teaching us how to stay in the driver’s seat of our lives, they really teach us how to push more activities into our lives that may or may not have value to us. The result is not that we manage time. It’s that time manages us. We become more scattered, instead of more focused.

In businesses and organizations the same pattern appears. Often, when looking at a company from the outside as a consultant, one can see people asking "How could we speed up this step?", instead of asking "How could we get rid of this step altogether?" Not "How do we chop up the task and distribute the load on everyone?", but "How to just completely remove the need for this attention?".

Software is increasingly replacing people whose main role is to pass information between team members, gather it or reshape it into the required format. Software can do that work faster and at a much lower cost. But instead of true automation, something else often happens. Tasks that were previously handled by one person become distributed across the entire team.

There is no longer one person who knows who to ask and who to inform. Instead, everyone is responsible for a small part of that work themselves – entering data, confirming it, marking it, forwarding it, notifying somebody else.

The outcome is paradoxical. The company or organization appears to become more efficient – one role has disappeared and software has been introduced – yet the actual amount of working time spent on non-value-creating activities has increased, often dramatically.

The trick is that it is no longer possible to measure clearly. The time is now scattered across the organisation in small pieces, spread throughout the day and across many people. In other words, the exact opposite of what usually happens when efficiency is improved has taken place: instead of consolidation, fragmentation.

For this reason, the greatest benefit rarely comes from introducing software or searching for "better" software. If software is designed merely to automate manual work, the manual steps still remain. The greatest benefit comes from designing work so that some steps can be left out.

The real gain comes when the entire process is reviewed and redesigned for a world where the centre of gravity of administrative work shifts toward software and systems architects. At first glance, this may seem like replacing a cheaper employee with a more expensive one. The difference is that one works to remain necessary within the company, while the other works toward a future where neither of them is needed at all.