I was recently watching the Netflix documentary American Manhunt: Osama bin Laden about (you guessed it) the manhunt for UBL.
It reminded me of something that I have long known. Our military and intelligence apparatus are incredibly effective, but not terribly efficient.
The two terms aren’t always mutually exclusive, but they often are. We gain effectiveness at the expense of efficiency.
We further degrade efficiency by becoming entrenched in old ideas and ways of thinking and by stove-piping information.
Many of us suffer from the same problem without realizing that it is a problem.
We are phenomenal problem solvers, yet seldom try to prevent the problems before they become problems.
I recently finished Dan Heath’s book Upstream. In it he relays an old parable of two men fishing at the river when they spot a child floating down the river frantically waving for assistance.
The men have just finished recovering the child when another one floats by. Before long, the two men are frantically retrieving drowning children when one of the men returns to shore and starts running away.
The second man shouts, “Hey, don’t leave me, we have to save these kids.”
The other man replies, “I’m going to run upstream and stop the guy who is throwing them in.”
The man rescuing the children was effective, but the man who stopped them from getting thrown in the water in the first place was efficient.
It is great to solve problems, but it is even greater to solve them as far upstream as possible.
You can be effective if you go out for lunch at work and try to eat according to your nutritional goals. You can be efficient if you make a week’s worth of lunches where you control the macros and bring them in.
You can be effective by calling the exterminator to deal with your termite infestation, or you can be efficient by scheduling preemptive treatment.
You can be effective by googling ‘full body workout’ when you get to the gym, or you can be efficient by building one ahead of time, or better yet, hiring a coach to do it for you.
To start solving problems upstream we have to:
- Identify the problem
- Trace its path upstream to its origin point
- Take action to prevent the problem
Of course, moving upstream is hard when you spend all your time and energy pulling kids out of the river.
The best place to start is to find a problem where a few metaphorical kids getting away won’t be damaging.
Once you solve that problem, you'll have some time to devote to working on another problem further upstream.
As you become more efficient, you’ll begin to identify problems earlier, trace them back to their source more quickly, and solve them more easily.
Until next week,
Keep Walking Point
John
If you have any questions or feedback about today's newsletter or if you'd just like to reach out, email me at john@walkingpoint.org. I’ll do my best to respond as quickly as possible.
