Against the Blind Pursuit of Efficiency

Today’s Cyb3rSyn Kaleidoscope brings short posts and a podcasts on a variety of topics.

Only the inefficient bees survive!

Imagine you're a management consultant hired by a beehive.

You notice that roughly 20% of the bees ignore the waggle dance and fly off in random directions. Almost all of them come back with nothing. Obvious waste.

You introduce OKRs, a waggle dance compliance dashboard and a performance improvement plan for the bottom 5%.

Next quarter, nectar is up. The hive is 100% efficient. You get a case study!

Then the cows eat the only meadow, nobody knows where anything else is, and the hive starves to death on the back of its best quarter ever.

Evolution ran this experiment for millions of years and kept the inefficient bees. We ran it for a couple of decades with just-in-time supply chains and found out in 2021.

The skier Hermann Maier wore a zero-friction suit that made him the fastest man on the mountain. Then he fell, and the suit meant nothing could slow him down.

Efficiency is wonderful right up until the moment you need to stop. When you blindly optimize, you actually fragilize.

I discuss this and many other mistakes Silicon Valley executives make in my book, 𝗠𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗠𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝗠𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁.

Also, please checkout this terrific post by Ivo Velitchkov that goes into the topic in much greater depth and nuance.

The Second Order Podcast, which was launched last week is also on Spotify. Please follow the podcast there if you are a Spotify user.

I made an another short video capturing an insights from Russell Ackoff’s book, “Beating The System” - check it out:

A typical Silicon Valley executive’s view of “constraint” is vastly different from the view cybernetics paints.

Last month, we got together and discussed the novel, Mania by Lionel Shriver.

Here is the full video recording of the group discussion for our premium-tier members…