Intentionally Inefficient

Given that everyone focuses on improving efficiencies, whether at a personal level or at work, it’s interesting to know that there are some situations where things are deliberately made inefficient. And not for the slow down to smell the roses reasons, but to actually improve the overall experience!

The most well-known example of a system that was deliberately made inefficient is the way the letters are organized on a keyboard (the QWERTY arrangement). Designed for the typewriter era, the idea was to slow down a typist so that he couldn’t cause the typewriter’s keys to collide and jam. Now, of course, we’re stuck with the inefficient QWERTY arrangement because that’s what everyone’s learnt and is familiar with!

Even in the realm of biology and life, there are advantages to being slightly inefficient. Like the pathogens that cause diseases. If they were uber-efficient and killed their hosts too fast, then they’d die out (along with the host) before they could be transmitted to the next individual!

Everyone curses the distance between the point you get off a plane to where you collect your bags. Guess what? That’s deliberate. Turns out an engineer once optimized the carousel allocation to be nearest to the point where you deplaned. And people hated it! Why? Because the system was too good: People were beating their baggage to the carousels and started complaining that they just kept waiting for their bags to arrive. And so airports reverted back to their older, inefficient carousel allocation system!

So the next time you curse a system for being inefficient, remember, it may actually be better that way!

Comments

  1. KumarDecember 16, 2011 at 6:17 PM

    Well. Whatever you do, there is no such thing as "always winning". In life, you win some times and you lose some times. So also, it is very obvious from your example that it is not efficiency which is always good; inefficiency can be good too!

    The anomaly arises when our government offices assert low efficiency is always good! Good for them, no doubt. What about us, the people?

    ReplyDelete

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