21. Why Efficiently is not the same as Effectively (particularly when working in Complex situations)

Working with the unknown unknowns of the complex domain (as in most situations involving people) brings even more challenges to the concept of ‘efficient’ alongside ‘effective’.

As some of you will know, I have been working on developing ways to help people build micro-local neighbourhood communities with Village In The City. I was thrilled that this work was featured by social explorer Cormac Russell in his latest book The Connected Community. Through this route, I was contacted by Joel Zaslofsky from Edina, Minnesota who is a mover-and-shaker in the world of community building.

Joel and I had a very interesting meet-up on Zoom, where he posed a very good question. Steps To A Humanity Of Organisation (this Substack) is about how to organise both humanely AND effectively. A lot of it so far has been about working humanely – with respect, with acknowledgement, with solution focus, with patience, with hosting. But what about the other side – working effectively? Joel asked me, right out, what I thought about the difference between ‘effectively’ and ‘efficiently’. What an excellent question! So that’s what I am exploring here this week. And, like all interesting questions, it’s a richer and more subtle distinction than you might be thinking…

Defining effective and efficient

Let’s start with the dictionary definitions. The Cambridge Dictionary offers these initial meanings:

Effective (adjective): successful or achieving the results that you want

Efficient (adjective):  working or operating in a way that gets the results you want without any waste

I immediately thought back to the example given by Stephen R Covey in his best-selling book The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People. It’s about climbing a ladder which is leaning against a wall. Covey says that climbing the ladder without wasting much energy is efficient – but making sure the ladder is leaning against the right wall is effective. If the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall, “every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster”.

“every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster”

Covey goes on to say that this is primarily a distinction between management and leadership. Management, he says, is about efficiency and climbing the ladder without waste. Leadership, on the other hand, is about ensuring that the ladder is again the right wall, in other words that the tasks being tackled are aligned with the desired future of the organisation. In this way, effectiveness comes first (are we doing the right things?) and efficiency follows on (are we doing things right?).

Of course, when the basics of an organisation or industry shift, this means re-assessing where the right wall is. This can come as a shock to people who have grown accustomed to doing things a certain way (with great efficiency) and are now asked to learn something different. I saw this at first hand during the privatisation of the UK electricity industry in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Briefly, a well-tuned system based on fuel costs was supplanted by a system of market-price bidding with all kinds of consequences, including the huge recent rises in UK power prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That’s another story for another time.

Efficiency when things are complex and unknown

“Once we know what we’re doing, we can get more efficient at it.” That sounds like Stephen Covey’s message, and it’s not totally incorrect. But what about situations such as community building where there are many unknowns (and un-knowables), where there is little existing structure (and that may be more of a hindrance than a help), and we don’t even know who is involved?

One way to examine this is through what has become known as the Cynefin framework. Named by Dave Snowden around the turn of the 21^st century (though it was around in various forms before that – I used something very similar in the mid 1990s), this shows how different situations and how best to tackle them can be split into five domains:

The Cyefin framework (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework)

On the right hand side are the two ‘knowable’ domains – Clear and Complicated. Clear situations can be handled by following simple rules and don’t require much in the way of skill. Complicated situations, as one might suppose, are more difficult and require considerable skill gained by experience. So, how to take a flight from A to B is Clear, whereas designing an airliner to get you from A to B is Complicated. Both these situations can be analysed, repeated and improved. Efficiency makes a great deal of sense here. If we know what we’re trying to do, we’ve done it before, we understand how it works, then it’s useful to think about doing it with less waste (of resources, energy, time and money).

On the left hand side of the diagram, however, are the two ‘unknowable’ domains. Much the most common of these is the Complex domain. Complexity, as the science of such systems is known, shows that they are not open to conventional cause-and-effect analysis. There are so many parts working together in subtle ways that the overall result, the effect, is not knowable in advance – even with good data and understanding. Weather systems are one good example – while weather forecasting has improved in recent decades, it is now understood that tiny differences today can evolve into huge differences tomorrow.

In my view, humanity has done ourselves a great deal of harm by seeking Clear or Complicated solutions where Complex fits much better. The whole business of mental illness diagnosis and cure, promulgated by the infamous Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), now in its fifth and hugely expanded edition, seeks to apply the logic of the Complicated domain (find symptoms, diagnose the ‘correct’ disorder, follow the designated treatment with a passive patient) to a situation which is much better handled with a Complex stance (take the client’s hopes seriously, use the client’s experience, get the client active in their own life, work with tiny signs and steps).

I was writing about the applications of complexity to the world of management and organisations as early as 1996. You can still read my landmark essay review Complexity Science and Management: What’s in it for business? which was published in the Strategic Planning Society journal Long Range Planning.  How to work with organisations and people as complex systems has been central to my work ever since.

Indeed, Solutions Focus is a wonderfully practical and pragmatic response to the difficulties of working with situations where change is happening all the time, the significance of that change is unknowable and conventional analysis is therefore a dead end.  (Not only will we be unable to find out every relevant factor, but the act of analytical inquiry will change things as we go along, also in unknowable ways.)  It seemed to me then, and this is still the case, that anything involving people is effectively a Complex situation; mending the washing machine may be Complicated, but motivating the washing machine technician is Complex! 😊

Completing the picture is the Chaotic domain, where things are moving too quickly for any kind of considered response and focus turns to simply keeping going. This is quite rare in real life and I won’t focus more on it in this piece. Snowden has added a fifth domain, Disorder (sometimes called Confused) in the middle where the domain is unclear.

Efficiency in the Complex domain

In general, effectiveness (let alone efficiency) is quite a challenge in the Complex domain. When actions do not have clear outcomes either beforehand or even post-hoc, linking success to anything in particular is fraught with difficulty. This kind of work is exploratory, every case is different, the differences matter (and in ways which are unknowable at the outset). However, it IS possible to work in a ‘brief’ mindset, where progress is important, dependency is avoided, and the goal is not to solve everything completely but to return to the normal state of everyday uncertainty. When Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) co-founder Steve de Shazer was asked how long SFBT should take, he replied

“As many sessions as it takes and not one session more”

I think this is an excellent benchmark for thinking about efficiency in the domain of complex situations. While we cannot say at the outset what would necessarily be an efficient outcome, there are all kinds of benefits to working with this brief mindset. It respects that we will not be the only (or even the main) players in promoting change, it is specifically about getting others involved and into the lead, and we are not doing to do for others what they can do for themselves (of for each other). Those focuses all help to point towards work that is both effective AND as efficient as possible.

Efficiency in community building

In his landmark book Community: The Structure Of Belonging, Peter Block writes about the transition from centralisation and individualism towards collectivism and interdependent community. He says:

This shift has important consequences for our communities. It offers to return politics to public service and restore our trust in leadership. It moves us from having faith in professionals and those in positions of authority to having faith in our neighbours. It takes us into a context of hospitality, wherein we welcome strangers rather than believing we need to protect ourselves from them. It changes our mind-set from valuing what is efficient to valuing belonging. It helps us leave behind our penchant for seeing our disconnectedness as an inevitable consequence of modern life and moves us toward accountability and citizenship. Block, Peter. Community: The Structure of Belonging (pp. 95-96). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.

I think Peter Block is pointing to a key aspect of community here; moving away from efficiency as the top line (and the bottom line, with things organised as cheaply as possible which ends up suiting those in power) towards valuing belonging first, without worrying at the outset what the consequences might be. Block says that when we ask powerful questions in community the result is growing accountability, mutual commitment and connection. This kind of thinking is not about ‘efficiency’, it’s about opening new doors and creating new relationships.

Conclusions

If we look at efficiency first, that’s about constraining people within a system. If we value belonging first, that’s about valuing people and seeing what will emerge from that. I can’t think of a better way to set out organising humanely, effectively – and in the end efficiently.

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Dates and mates

This piece started with a conversation with Joel Zaslofsky who has all kinds of ideas about creating neighbourhood communities. Check out his website at

https://joelzaslofsky.com/

It’s nearly time for the SOLWorld and Host Leadership events for 2023. There’s still time to book and join us in Vienna for some wonderful events, great learnings, super connections and lovely people.

SOLWorld 2023 8-10 June https://www.solworld2023.at/

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