About me
Bookshop

Get new posts by email.

About me

Efficient destruction

In Utopia for Realists, Rutger Bregman wrote:

Some things in life, like music, resist all attempts at greater efficiency. While we can produce coffee machines ever faster and more cheaply, a violinist can’t pick up the pace without spoiling the tune.

I’ve also read Rory Sutherland’s ‘doorman fallacy’, though I don’t think I’ve ever read Alchemy from which it originates:

The ‘doorman fallacy’, as I call it, is what happens when your strategy becomes synonymous with cost-saving and efficiency; first you define a hotel doorman’s role as ‘opening the door’, then you replace his role with an automatic door-opening mechanism.

The problem arises because opening the door is only the notional role of a doorman; his other, less definable sources of value lie in a multiplicity of other functions, in addition to door-opening: taxi-hailing, security, vagrant discouragement, customer recognition, as well as in signalling the status of the hotel. The doorman may actually increase what you can charge for a night’s stay in your hotel.

It strikes me that there’s sometimes a crossover between these things. Sometimes, greater efficiency isn’t possible because we’re not comprehensively understanding the task. The task of playing the violin is not merely to produce all of the right notes in the correct order, just as the task of the doorman is not simply to open the door.

Something I’ve often found myself saying in the age of Microsoft Teams is that the point of attending a meeting sometimes has nothing to do with the meeting itself. Sometimes—perhaps even often—the value is in the corridor conversations before and after the meeting, either because that’s where the real ‘intelligence’ lies or because they provide an opportunity for solid relationship building. I’m not yet aware of a good online recreation of that aspect of meetings.

And, of course, this applies in all sorts of areas of professional life. I suspect this is more true in medicine than in many other professions, though perhaps I’m biased. Often, the value of a consultation isn’t really in the problem-focused clinical interaction but in the built trust and confidence.

Sometimes, making human interactions more efficient can destroy them as effectively as speeding up the violinist can ruin a piece of music.


The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

This post was filed under: Post-a-day 2023.

Recently published posts

1080—1980 / 21 December 2024

Cascading sets / 20 December 2024

New Metro, old problems / 19 December 2024

Moonlight / 18 December 2024

‘A long way home’ / 17 December 2024

Peanut / 16 December 2024




Random posts from the archive





The content of this site is copyright protected by a Creative Commons License, with some rights reserved. All trademarks, images and logos remain the property of their respective owners. The accuracy of information on this site is in no way guaranteed. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author. No responsibility can be accepted for any loss or damage caused by reliance on the information provided by this site. Information about cookies and the handling of emails submitted for the 'new posts by email' service can be found in the privacy policy. This site uses affiliate links: if you buy something via a link on this site, I might get a small percentage in commission. Here's hoping.