Has Efficiency Eroded Your Humanity?
I remember when I first saw efficiency cast in a negative light: “Efficiency is not the same as effectiveness” was the gist, and that was an ah-ha moment for me. It’s a concept I’ve since discussed in this newsletter and with my clients; that you can become extremely efficient at doing the wrong things, which can have a negative impact over time.
But the PR campaign for extreme efficiency hasn’t stopped. Automation and AI are just the newest tools being pushed on us by tech companies that want to remove all friction and inconvenience from our lives.
As small businesses owners, we’re feeling pressure to automate everything and use AI wherever possible, without stopping to ask what we’re losing in the process. And what we’re losing may be our capacity to slow down to connect with, and care for, the people who are our customers, neighbors, and community members.
Recently, I saw efficiency criticized as the absence of resilience in the excellent book “How Infrastructure Works” by Deb Chachra. She writes,
“Making systems resilient is fundamentally at odds with optimization, because optimizing a system means taking out any slack…For a system to be reliable, on the other hand, there have to be some unused resources to draw on when the unexpected happens, which, well, happens predictably.”
Chachra’s book is about public infrastructure (power grids, municipal water, etc.) but the concepts apply to the systems in our businesses. She’s saying that perfectly efficient systems with no wasted resources are brittle, because they have no capacity to respond to something new or unexpected.
A perfectly efficient system isn’t resilient and doesn’t hold space for connection, care, or reflection. But those are critical elements for every type of business system, from finances, to customer service, to marketing strategy.
Resilience is a central part of strong financial systems—what else could possibly be at the core of a good customer service system than care and connection?—and how can we market ourselves and reach new customers if we don’t make time to reflect on the value we have to offer?
Too much efficiency robs us of the capacity to connect and care. Automation and AI make it easier than ever to go down that road, even unintentionally. But without connection and care, what is bonding us and our businesses to our communities? For that matter, what is bonding our customers to our businesses?
Connection isn’t just a warm and fuzzy feeling, it’s an essential component of success. We don’t have the scale or revenue diversity of Amazon or Target. We rely on direct support from individual people and we need to value and nurture those relationships, or they will go away. We need to be more to our customers than just a line item that gets deleted when they need to tighten their budgets.
So I’m skeptical of automating, or outsourcing to AI, the most essential parts of my business. Real people don’t want to be shoved through an automated sales funnel. Real people don’t want to wrestle with an AI-enabled customer service app or CRM just to set up an appointment or get a question answered. Real people aren’t interested in AI-generated copy or social media posts.
Real people want to interact with a real person. Sure, it’s not “frictionless” and it may even seem inconvenient, but we’re not meant to maximize convenience at the expense of connection.
There is, of course, a place for some automation, maybe even AI, in our businesses. Many administrative processes really benefit from tech-driven efficiency improvements. Keep using technology that helps you run your business better!
But make sure it doesn’t sever your essential connections to your customers and community. Technology can erode your humanity if you let it.
A final thought from Deb Chachra (seriously her book is so good):
“To capitalism, sustainability always looks like underutilization.”
