The Allure of Efficiency
Do we mistake productivity for purpose?
I was putting together slides for a workshop on grief and loss I’d been asked to lead at an upcoming conference.
When you’re getting ready for a keynote or a workshop, you usually get a timeline weeks in advance. Sometimes the organizers care a lot about having the slides early. Sometimes they don’t care much at all, and you show up with a USB stick and make it work. I’m comfortable with either timeline, though I do have a habit of wanting to keep iterating right up until the last minute.
This time, though, I hadn’t seen a timeline. No deadline, no expectation of when the slides needed to be finished. Then I received a message, along with another workshop leader, that the slides were needed the next day.
This experience strikes me as a symptom of a “hop-to-it” culture. That quick email that lands in your inbox: I need this by tomorrow. You don’t know why. Maybe it’s just someone’s preference. Maybe there’s a real need behind it. Maybe they won’t get around to looking at it for another week, despite the frantic effort needed to get it to them. It shows up everywhere, not only at work. It’s the parent standing over a kid who’s taking an extra few minutes to tie his shoes, tempted to just do it for him because we’re already running behind. It’s not telling a friend that you don’t actually feel up for getting together today, that you’d have loved to, but your own embodied limits won’t stretch that far right now. You don’t want to disappoint. You don’t want to fail to meet expectations — real or imagined.
Having a mandate to consider organizational culture gives me a kind of privilege at moments like this to hit “pause.” Not just to ask whether I can get slides together by the next day (they wouldn’t have been up to my usual standard, but sure, I could have). The harder question is whether I should reinforce a culture that expects people to hop to it without a shared, transparent reason why. So I asked. “Why is this needed by tomorrow? Why the quick turn-around?” Turned out, it wasn’t, not really. Someone higher up in the organization had asked to see the slide decks, which lit a fire under the organizers, who then lit a fire under us. So I asked whether could we agree upon a timeline that let me work within my own limits but also to the best of my ability. We could. We did. The slides were magnificent.
There wasn’t any ill intent in these events. We are all busy, and we are all working toward a shared goal of excellence in services, supports, and even slides. I’m happy to be a part of a team that is so committed to quality. But even the best teams can get caught up in our prevailing culture that prioritizes productivity over purpose — in the little things, if not in the big things.
It all worked out, and unpacking the potential impact with my colleague helped us adjust our approach. But the initial flurry of emails reminded me of the cybersecurity trainings we all sit through almost weekly now, the modules on phishing and other manufactured emergencies. At the centre of nearly every one of those scams is the same move: a fabricated urgency, concocted to get you to act before you count the cost, the rationale, or the impact on people (including yourself) down the line. Many of these scams tap in to relational or hierarchical expectations: Someone trusts you to do this right. Someone higher on an org chart is relying on you. Act before you pause. Act before asking not only whether something is plausible, but whether it’s right. Just get it done.
I’m reminded of Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of managerial effectiveness. He takes a while in After Virtue to dismantle a claim most of us have accepted without noticing it: that management is a kind of applied science, that somewhere out there is real expert knowledge capable of, in his words, “systematic effectiveness in controlling certain aspects of social reality” (After Virtue, 88). We assume someone has cracked the code on predicting how a person, a team, or a whole organization will behave, if you just get the inputs right. No one has. There is no law for human behaviour the way there is a law for gravity. What gets sold to us as expertise is mostly what MacIntyre calls treating “ends as given, as outside his scope,” with the real concern reserved for “technique” (After Virtue, 35). We have confused technical skill with controlling an outcome. We’ve let the institutional demand for visible results eclipse the unassuming goods internal to the practice itself.
“Somewhere out there is real expert knowledge capable of systematic effectiveness in controlling certain aspects of social reality.” — Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 88
This isn’t an engineering problem that better data will eventually solve. It’s a limit built into what a person actually is. You cannot model your way into certainty about another human being any more than you can fully author their story for them, or your own (recalling my previous post). This limit works in our favour. It keeps people from collapsing into a means to an end.
It would be tempting to think that once you’ve identified this fiction of effectiveness, its pull on you goes away too. It doesn’t. The lure of efficiency was never really about whether it works. Suppose MacIntyre is wrong. Suppose the algorithm eventually gets good enough, the model tight enough, that something really can predict what a person will do next. That would only clear away the excuse we’d been hiding behind, and leave us facing the question we skipped to get there. The real question isn’t “Can we?” but “Should we?”
That confusion, can for should, is nowhere more visible right now than in the rush to build artificial intelligence into decision-making, in developmental services as much as anywhere else. The pitch is rarely “we’ve thought carefully about whether this serves the people in front of us.” The pitch is “this will make things faster.”
Effectiveness is our favourite alibi: if it works, it must be right.
I understand the pull of it. It is a kind of siren song, promising relief from the harder, slower, more exposed work of asking whether something is actually right. Let the system decide. Let the sector decide. My job, then, is only to execute it faster.
That’s the real cost of the moral fiction of effectiveness. It doesn’t only fail to work the way we imagine. It lets us hand off ownership of the one question that was always ours to answer: is this good? If a supervisor asks for it, I assume it must be fine. My job is delivery, not discernment. If everyone else in the sector has already adopted the same tool, I assume the direction was vetted somewhere upstream of me. MacIntyre would say we’ve quietly recast ourselves as managers, technicians of a given end, when we were supposed to be moral agents capable of asking what the end should be in the first place, and cultivating the virtues needed to live toward it.
Ask if it’s right before asking if it’s possible.
Viewing everything in the light of eternity is the vantage point every one of us has to answer to before we start down a path, not only something we consider once we’ve arrived at the destination.
In Formed Together, I considered the “core competencies” every direct support professional in Ontario was trained and evaluated on at the time and paid particular attention to one: fostering independence in others. Of course we want to reduce coercion and the abuses of power that come with over-controlled care, and a person’s real agency over their own life is crucial to protect. But the competency arrived already carrying an unexamined value. As I wrote there, “it becomes difficult to separate the aims of maximizing cost-benefit ratios from an emphasis on ‘independence’ as a human good” (47). Independence, pursued as an end in itself and without a matching commitment to belonging, doesn’t automatically produce a good life. It can produce something closer to isolation: “up to half of persons with intellectual disabilities are chronically lonely, compared with around 15-30 percent of people in the general population” (48). We worked to get more efficient at independence, which also serves the sector’s goals to reduce costs. We didn’t ask, closely enough, whether independence alone is a good worth serving.
Pope Leo XIV highlights the same pattern on a civilizational scale. In Magnifica Humanitas, he writes that Babel, “reveals the limits of any effort that, however grandiose, arises from self-affirmation, sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing” (para. 7). Self-sufficiency was the whole project at Babel—one language, one technology, one direction—built by people who answered to no one above or beside them. The result was scattering, not the unity they were chasing. I wonder if one of the value we quietly installed at the centre of care, and now at the centre of our AI-assisted efficiency, is the same value that raised that tower: autonomy treated as the highest good, self-sufficiency mistaken for virtue. The question was never only whether we can make people, or ourselves, more independent, more efficient, more optimized. The question that has to come first is whether that’s actually the direction we were created to walk in, together.
All of this was still working itself out in my head a couple of weeks later, at the work conference. That workshop was the one where I handed flowers to everyone in the room, one to keep and one to give away. If you read that post, you know how the session went. It was a beautiful time of sharing stories of grief and love and the limits of ourselves in loss. In fact, the person who had originally asked for those slides joined the session and found it moving.
Ironically, I ended up largely abandoning the slide deck altogether. The people in the room, those with and without disabilities, jumped in to share their rich stories and experiences. My magnificent slides paled in comparison. So much for my efficiency.
Great thoughts here, Keith, though I admit for the sake of efficiency😊 I did skim it because my dog was waiting for me to take her for a walk. I will read it more thoroughly and add some comments.
Oh man yes to this. Like the amount of meetings alone that people have in various sectors to discuss the things that need doing instead of just doing them.