Intentional Inefficiency
Hitting the Brakes Before It's Too Late
My date excitedly talked and shared her heart, but I drifted slowly to sleep.
My frenetic pace had driven my internal systems to collapse and shut down.
I had decided I had no choice but to hold three jobs including an overnight job at a hotel, and attempt to keep high grades with a full load of college classes. My superhero-syndrome had driven me to believe my capacity could also allow me to get little to no sleep and still carefully pay attention to developing a romantic relationship.
Thankfully my date was gracious, kind, and understanding. She understood how hard I was working to ensure I could pay my own way through college and complete it in the normal four years.
Others weren’t so understanding when my chaos turned to mayhem.
My chauffeur job was suddenly cut short when in the midst of chaotic schedules I forgot to pick up a University President – and he tweeted a photo of the airport pickup line ghostly empty.
I was nowhere to be found.
I bravely stemmed tears in my eyes as I sat on an old couch in the hotel lobby where I had my other job and my boss at the time kindly told me: if you don’t stop, you’re going to kill yourself.
Then he fired me.
Taiichi Ohno, a Chinese immigrant to Japan, began his career at the Toyoda Spinning and Automatic Loom Works immediately after his graduation. By 1943, he was a production engineer with the Toyota Motor Company.
Unfortunately, the company was in danger of collapse.
It lagged behind its American counterparts and was operating at a loss. Taiichi was told he had to fix the problems.
He decided to understand what made America the best in the world, and after a tour of the Ford Motor Company’s manufacturing line he birthed the ideas of what would become known as the “Toyota Production System” and ultimately the development of Lean Manufacturing.
This system would radically eliminate waste in production lines and create efficiencies never before seen in manufacturing.
What is most fascinating about the system he created is not the incredible efforts that eliminate waste and create incredible efficiencies in systems that led to massive profits for the company, but the intentional inefficiencies that Taiichi built into the way the company operated.
Taiichi’s system was called Jidoka, literally translated as “automation with a human touch” and more loosely as “autonomation.”
He had noticed that while automated machines could produce parts quickly, they couldn't detect defects or stop production when something went wrong. This led to inefficiencies such as producing defective parts or overproducing goods that couldn't be sold.
It turns out that going as fast and as hard as you can won’t necessarily produce the outcomes you desire. In fact, it will do the opposite.
Despite crushing pressure to find ways to increase production and efficiency, Ohno deliberately introduced inefficiencies into the production line by implementing Andon.
Andon was a system of manual pull cords that workers could use to stop the production line if they detected a problem.
The paradox was striking: by introducing intentional pauses in production, a move seemingly opposing the goal of achieving efficiency, it created some of the world’s most efficient and effective production lines in history.
There is grave danger of pursuing efficiency over effectiveness.
In a story shared in his new book Slow Productivity, Cal Newport points us to a tragic result of pursuing efficiency at all costs. In 2021, amidst the height of COVID, Jonathan Frostick was an IT worker who, like many others, was doing Zoom constantly.
When he realized he was having a heart attack, his first thought was not to get medical attention. It was “this isn’t convenient.” His second thought also wasn’t about medical attention – he was concerned about getting funding for his project at work. Then he quickly thought about whether he had updated his will, and lastly prayed his wife wouldn’t find him dead.
Finally, the production line that was his life ground to a halt as his wife dialed for medical help.
"Whereas before I would finish sensibly anywhere between five and half six, I'd be finding myself there on a Friday at 8 o'clock at night exhausted, thinking I need to prep up something for Monday and I haven't got time, and I started then to actually work weekends," Frostick told the Bloomberg. "That's my responsibility. I think that was probably for me where it was those blurring of boundaries."
If only Frostick had a cord to pull to shut things down at the first signs of burnout, he might have avoided this almost catastrophic event. There have been thousands of attempts at an answer to not only identifying but also doing something about this tendency towards an all-or-nothing approach to efficiency and productivity.
One of the best antidotes to the drive towards automation and endless efficiency is the call from Cal Newport to people to do what he calls “Deep Work,” and more recently “Slow Productivity.”
His belief is that humans at their best will focus on fewer things, work at a natural pace and obsess over quality. Cal would encourage people to quit social media, embrace boredom, and to find creative ways to decline and say “no” to more work on your schedule. It’s a ruthless elimination of distraction and the pursuit of more.
But to get to this place, you have to have something that gets you to realize you even need this change. We don’t make changes in our lives until a sudden event or intentional “pull” shakes us from our routine.
We cannot be sucked into believing that a frenetic pace means we are more worthy as human beings. Instead, we have to be willing at moments to slow down and perhaps even slam the brakes to pause, reflect, and make sure we don’t proceed before the defect is too far down the line.
Building out people or systems in our lives that serve as andon is essential, and both the Jewish and Christian faith give us a potential answer.
For the Jew and Christian, there is a regular rhythm of “sabbath,” (from shavat, “cease,” or “desist”), a day of holiness and rest observed by Jews from sunset on Friday to nightfall of the following day, and for Christians a day of rest on Sunday.
A striking contrast between the other five or six days of intense movement, intentional inefficiency is built into the very pattern of life for every Jew and Christian. They are forced to pull the cord and stop the system every week – and hopefully examine and ensure nothing defective is shipped.
This might not be the answer for everyone. For others it might be a pattern of slow daily walks with nothing else committed but to watch and observe the world around them. Maybe it’s turning off the phone before bed, meditation in the early morning, or silently driving home to clear your mind.
In business and leadership, it’s particularly easy to avoid intentional inefficiencies. In efforts to streamline, to eliminate “wasted” conversations, we can as leaders be quick to live in a constant frantic state where we’re driven by the next meeting, deadline, or email in our inbox. But the best leaders find ways to shut down the system and to find ways to improve by slowing down.
Recently I had the opportunity to speak to a CEO and founder of an up-and-coming company that’s received massive attention and investment from some of the most exciting people in the U.S. I had just 30 minutes on the calendar, and it was clear his team was primed to ensure maximum efficiency with his schedule and time.
But when I shared I was not only interested in talking about his story, I was also a customer – he immediately enforced an inefficiency and slowed the conversation down. We talked for over an hour about the product as he took meticulous notes.
Great leaders have the ability to recognize when they need to pull the cord and stop the machines for a moment to lean in, to learn, and to improve the process or the product.
Recently my “date” was my six-year-old daughter.
It was one of those days where you can have the windows down, the music cranked, and smiles on your face as you race down the road with wind and laughter streaming through the car.
We played games at an arcade and won BIG (I have a strategy that always works), and while we sat down after a quick dinner for dessert, the deep red sunset over her shoulder pulled me into deep thought.
I couldn’t help but for a second be transformed in my mind for a moment, seeing myself falling asleep in that car with the girl who would eventually be my wife. I’d pushed myself to the absolute brink, attempting to maximize each and every moment – not realizing the desperate need I had for someone to pull the ANDON cord for me.
So many times, over and over again, I would find myself slipping into a mentality of efficiency and speed and productivity. But not at this moment.
This was a sacred moment of intentional inefficiency. No to-do lists, no meetings, no brainstorming, no notes.
I was all there.
No multiple jobs, no notifications dinging on the phone, no mind wandering off to the next place or thing.
“Hurry kills joy, gratitude, appreciation; people in a rush don’t have time to enter the goodness of the moment,” John Mark Comer, author of The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, has reminded us all. He’s right.
Every human needs intentional inefficiency. To pause, to cease, to desist from the path of productivity and to just enter the goodness of the moment.
Don’t wait until you find yourself asleep on a date, losing a job or even God-forbid mild-heart-attack to commit to intentional inefficiencies into your life. We cannot continue to frantically and frenetically pursue a pace, confident we can handle it – until we can’t.
Thanks for reading,
Tim
Special thanks to the wonderful feedback from
and , who serve as their own "Andon” cords for me regularly.
Your essays are getting better & better. Love the topics you're exploring.
One of my favorite signs of growth is when I stepped on the brakes well before I burned out.
It was then I knew I was stepping towards a healthier relationship with work.
And it felt amazing.
That circling back to your daughter as your next date. So good!