Efficient. Buzz word. Through and through there is no word that has less meaning to daily use ratio. Whenever I hear someone talk about becoming more efficient or improving this or that efficiency I can’t help but stop and ask why they are being willfully inefficient to begin with. Saying you are going to do better is like saying, “I know I’m doing it wrong now, but I just don’t care.”
Perceived lack of efficiency is a symptom of a problem – not the problem itself. If a process has too many steps let’s understand the root cause of why – not just reduce the number of steps. Reduction for reduction’s sake will only eventually lead to the same issue again later but this time it may be worse.
Let’s all agree today that the word efficiency without immediate follow up and clarification should be stricken from our vocabulary. It may be a great sounding word, but it doesn’t ever aid the conversation.
I agree with most of your post. Efficiency can be a vague buzzword unless you detail how to make a process more efficient. “Let’s be more efficient!” aren’t some magic words that will make it so.
But I don’t think your first paragraph is very fair. I don’t know about your industry, but in software for example, one can validly recognize and admit that a process is inefficient without being apathetic about it. In rare it’s the nature of the problem (e.g., it requires a brute-force exhaustive search), but often we can see where improvements can be made but not have had the time yet to implement those changes.
I think you could say the same thing about inefficiency in other areas. It’s easy to recognize problems; it’s less easy — but still relatively easy — to understand, at least at a high level, what the solutions are. The hardest part is finding the time and will to implement those solutions. It’s more like saying, “I know I’m doing it wrong now, and I know how to fix it, but I just don’t have the time or buy-in.”
I’m not saying this is the case all the time — I don’t doubt you run into the situation you describe quite often. But I think it’s frequent enough that you can’t make a blanket statement that people are being willfully inefficient.
I guess where I’m going is the “Efficient” is a crutch word. It has too many connotations that are vague and unclear. In your example it sounds more clear and effective to say “the algorithm is slow” or “there are too many lines of code for the effect generated.” You could say “the algorithm is inefficient” but that doesn’t tell you 1) how it is inefficient or 2) why it is inefficient. You learn nothing that you can take away, fix or do better next time from simply knowing it is inefficient.
Maybe may case of willful inefficiency is inaccurate. What I mean to say is that if a person knows their process of turning around an invoice takes too long but they aren’t speeding up because “the process is inefficient” I have no net visibility to why they can’t speed up. There is no valid reasoning such as “accounting requires these additional documents” or “the copy machine is 20 years old and jams on every second page.” Both cause inefficiencies that may or may not be correctable, but saying “the process is inefficient” does not help in either moving past the problem or fixing the problem.
Well, it depends who I’m talking to, right? If I’m talking to my project manager, I might just say, “This code is too slow” or even just “The code is inefficient, but it’s only a first pass. We can make it more efficient later”, and I would expect him to take my word for it. If I’m talking to a fellow programmer, I would go into much more detail about what about the code is inefficient and how we can improve it.
You seem to be talking more about people begging the question. “Invoicing is taking too long.” “Why?” “Because the process is inefficient.” “Yes, you just told me that. Why?” “Because it’s inefficient! QED.” And I completely agree with you there. It’s kind of like how on the old FJM blog they would chide Joe Morgan for saying a team or player wasn’t consistent. Consistency and efficiency are results, not causes.