I talk a lot about effectiveness and how it differs from efficiency. This is probably due to two reasons: firstly, the difference between these two concepts is central to the lean mindset. Secondly, I’m Swedish.
Swedish is a very poor language compared to, for example, English, which is much richer. If I were to translate the first sentence of this blog post into Swedish, you’ll understand what I mean:
Jag pratar ofta om effektivitet och hur det skiljer sig från effektivitet
Ah, the poverty! It’s the same word. There’s no difference… in Swedish. I have yet to understand if that means that Swedes are focused on effectiveness or efficiency.
But this linguistic poverty has been a trigger for learning for me. I’ve really tried to deep dive into this.
To this date, this is the best and simplest way to describe the difference between the two concepts:
For a sprinter, efficiency is about running without wasting energy. Make sure your hands don’t take up a lot of air, be very particular about how you move your legs, when is the best time to raise your head, how long should your steps be in the beginning, middle, or end of the race. How do I use the energy from the start in my first 10 meters, etc.
For a sprinter, effectiveness is running in the right direction. Towards the goal, if I may offer a suggestion.
Effectiveness has to do with reaching our goal. In fact, I don’t care much about efficiency until we know where we are going. Imagine seeing Usain Bolt take off from the starting block and run the wrong way! We would all go:
Why on earth did he do that? Doesn’t he know where he’s going? He knows where the goal is, right?
Very few would say:
Yeah sure, he ran the wrong way, but did you see those knees?! Perfect execution - very efficient!
For a deeper treatment about the differences, see this post by Staffan Nöteberg.
You’re a Running Expert Now? What Does This Have to Do with Us?
In many organizations, we are not in agreement about the goal—the vision that I’ve blogged about recently. And many organizations are trying to optimize our efficiency.
Let me give you a couple of examples:
IT Development at an Insurance Company
At one big company I was consulting at, the time from idea for a new software feature (even small things like spelling fixes, layout changes, or reports) to deployed software was 8 months. The actual programming time was a couple of days, sometimes hours. Where do you think we started to implement efficiency? Yes, that’s right—we trained the developers to be more efficient. Surely that would help us.
In fact, a lot of the time was waiting time, decided on beforehand by schedules because we only deploy 4 times a year. It’s right there. In our IT policy.
What Is the Goal in This Case?
Software exists to solve a problem for a user. Until it’s used, software is truly useless, to use the wise words of Woody Zuill, and the agile manifesto principles. The goal is to have the software used by users. To become “more effective” would mean to give the users more usable code faster.
Health Care
Right now I’m serving in a new area (and a new country) trying to help the six hospitals that the Salvation Army has in Indonesia. I went in very bold—effectiveness; I know this. Just make the system flow faster to the end-customer, which is the patient in this case.
What Is the Goal in This Case?
But what is the goal of a health care service provider? Is it speedy delivery really? No, not really. The goal of health care (as I think now, I hope this changes to something wiser) is to cure the patient, or provide quality in the health service.
Using effectiveness as your guiding star and principle, you will automatically get a patient perspective and put the patient (who said end-customer?) in focus. This is how we measure the quality of our service—the experience and end-result of the patient.
Sure, the internal processes are important and need to be looked over, but if we’re not putting quality care first and the patient in focus, we’re running the wrong way.
That doesn’t mean that a fast flow is unimportant. If your process flows faster, the quality has to be good. If your process produces bad quality, you will end up creating waste in the form of rework and failure demand. The difference, for me, is that for other businesses (such as manufacturing and software development), faster flow can in itself be something to strive for. In health care, I see it more as a means to increase the quality, which is the goal of the system.
Pastors, Coaches, and Parents
For a pastor, effectiveness will be… eeeh? This is harder. The only thing I’m sure of is that counting the number of pastoral calls, number of meetings held, number of prayers said, etc., is not the target. This is at best measuring the efficiency of the pastor.
And that’s not what we are after—we are after the effectiveness of the system. The goal, the purpose of the pastor being in the church, or having a church in the first place.
What Is the Goal in This Case?
I’m no pastor. And I don’t for a second think that I know more about their very special job than they do. I simply cannot answer this question adequately.
But this is a nice way to reason about this question that I’ve used for myself when I was asked the same kind of question about the role of an agile coach:
If we didn’t have a pastor here, how would you notice the difference?
If the team didn’t have an agile coach, how would that change the team? What would be better? What would be worse?
As a parent, what kind of outcomes am I looking for in my kids that my parenting has given them?
I’ll leave that as an exercise for you to think about. When I come up with something worth writing, I’ll come back to you.
Summary
To me, this has a strong connection with a holistic systems thinking view; we are more interested in the output/outcomes of the system rather than optimizing certain parts of the system. It is as a whole that we can affect the overall effectiveness of the system.
To know about the goal of the overall system, we need to step back and ask ourselves why we are here. What is the purpose of our organization? Why do people turn to us?
Those are hard questions to answer sometimes. Hard because they might point to the fact that the kind of efficiency-increasing measures we are focusing on today might not be the correct ones.
Are you ready to ask those questions? Are you willing to change to improve for real? To improve the effectiveness rather than to improve efficiency? Are you willing to not only run fast but to run towards the goal?