In our complex world, efficiency shouldn’t be the ultimate goal.

No matter what your job, the concept of efficiency won’t be new to you. In fact, you probably use it even when you’re just arranging your pencils on a desk!

Efficiency is widely recognized as something worth achieving, and most of today’s organizations have set efficiency as their principal goal.

Even outside of business, our society is obsessed with efficiency. From organizing our leisure time and life hacks to the management of international companies, everyone is trying to achieve the best results with the least effort; in other words, they want to be as efficient as possible.

Our love for efficiency can be traced back to 1900, when Quaker Frederick Winslow Taylor laid the foundations of scientific management. By measuring various work processes in order to shave off every second he could throughout the production process, Taylor produced unprecedented results.  

But in a complex world, efficiency does not equal success.

The rapid development of information technology has changed the world we live in. Not only has it become much faster, but also more interdependent, meaning that a seemingly endless number of factors interact to produce highly unpredictable outcomes.

Much like the theory that a butterfly’s wings in New York can start a hurricane in China, a YouTube video can start a revolution. In 2010, a man named Tarek protested police corruption in a small town in Tunisia by setting himself aflame. His cousin, who filmed the whole thing, posted it on YouTube where it was seen by millions of people.

These people then started their own protests, which eventually led to the end of the 30-year reign of President Mubarak in neighboring Egypt. This outcome was entirely unpredictable at the time of Tarek’s protest.

Taylor’s scientific management was designed for a world where an all-seeing manager could more or less accurately predict the outcomes of a given action. As our example shows, things are very different today.