Beware Efficiency
Learn about efficiency vs. flexibility and efficiency vs. adaptability.
Efficiency V/S Adaptability
“Efficiency” sounds like it could only ever be a good thing, right? Just try telling the CEO that the company is too efficient and needs to introduce some inefficiency! But efficiency can go wrong in two crucial ways that hurt adaptability.
Efficiency sometimes translates to “fully utilized.” In other words, our company is “efficient” if every developer develops and every designer designs close to 100 percent of the time.
This looks good when we watch the people. But if we watch how the work moves through the system, we’ll see that this is anything but efficient. We’ve seen this lesson time and time again from Goal [Gol04], to Lean Software Development [PP03], to Principles of Product Development Flow [Rei09], to ...