Stop Optimizing
Why good leaders embrace “good enough”
I was ten minutes into roasting a salmon filet for dinner when the oven started blaring an alarm. An error code flashed on the display and with a sharp click, the appliance promptly shut itself off.
I eyed the aging Frigidaire with contempt; this was not our first altercation. “Someday,” I thought, “I’ll buy myself a brand-new oven that just works.” I popped the filet back into the broiler, hoping the ambient warmth would finish the job. And a few minutes later, to my great surprise, I pulled out the most perfectly-cooked salmon I have ever prepared.
So, what happened? By shutting itself down, my imperfect machine helped me — an imperfect human — achieve something I hadn’t been able to accomplish when things were working as intended.
This might seem like a silly example. But it struck me that I wouldn’t have gotten to this delicious meal with a newer, fancier machine. In this case, a little bit of malfunction did me good.
We have a cultural obsession with optimization, and understandably: who doesn’t want a life that’s functional, effective, efficient? We’re quick to consider how we can improve and streamline our efforts; we’re less quick to wonder what else might be lost in the process. As someone who supports leaders and innovators in creating change within systems, I am often in a position to advocate for improvements. What I want to offer here is the opposite perspective: how do we know when not to intervene?
“By shutting itself down, my imperfect machine helped me — an imperfect human — achieve something I hadn’t been able to accomplish when things were working as intended.”
Now, I’m not saying we should covet broken ovens. But I do think there are reasons to give ourselves pause when it comes to making things better. The first one is this: how often do we replace something with a newer, better version, only to find that the previous system had its own unique advantages? I’ll call this new is not necessarily better.
A related principle has to do with the questionable purposes that so often drive optimization. We’re taught to value efficiency and effectiveness, even when the outcome doesn’t actually improve our lives. Here we should ask, optimize for what? In fact, sometimes the very flaws we are so keen to fix turn out to have been the advantages all along. This is the “unintended consequences” argument.
And finally, one of the biggest mistakes we can make as leaders is overestimating people’s capacity to keep pace with changing systems. I’ll call this the “rationality miscalculation.” Human beings are incredibly adaptable, but the psychology of change is rarely linear. Often the most effective strategy for change is keeping things simple and getting out of the way.
I’ll touch on each of these in the examples that follow to paint a picture of what we lose when we become addicted to improvement.
Two steps forward, one step back
New is not necessarily better. If you’ve lived through any major shift in technology, you know this first-hand. Most innovations are two-steps-forward, one-step-back. In many cases, optimization in one dimension causes an unanticipated loss in another.
There’s a bit in the science fiction series Animorphs where the brilliant and benevolent alien species is dumbfounded that humans invented books before the internet. On his planet it was books that were the improvement since, after all, the pages in a book load much quicker. And indeed, research shows that typing may allow you to capture more information than writing by hand, but you’ll remember less of it along the way.
Mp3s are far less prone to skipping than CDs were, but you can’t hand someone a Spotify playlist with the same satisfaction that you could gift them a mixed CD. And nobody has yet invented a format for sharing music with quite the same sound quality as records.
Optimize for what?
All this begs the question: what are we optimizing for?
Half the time we invent things that aren’t needed or wanted (anyone remember Blu-ray?) and the other half of the time we become so allegiant to special interests that we end up working against the needs of the ultimate user. Think about apps that bombard you with ads and infinite scrolling, or test-taking software that monitors the user’s movements to “prevent cheating.”
The same is true of so-called “hostile architecture.” You can celebrate the effectiveness of the armrests on anti-homelessness benches, but these designs do nothing to actually solve the problem of houseless people needing a place to sleep at night.
None of these solutions actually create a more functional experience for the person using them (though they do make some people a lot of money!). Neither, I would argue, do so many of our attempts to optimize in our own lives necessarily lead to an improved quality of life. To be fair, we are promised the benefits of optimization by those in power, not realizing it’s more of a trade than a gift.
“You can celebrate the effectiveness of the armrests on anti-homelessness benches, but these designs do nothing to actually solve the problem of houseless people needing a place to sleep at night.”
Consolidating all your purchases into one big Amazon order may be convenient, but it also eliminates the possibility of discovery: of noticing a product on the shelves that inspires a new recipe, or running into a friend in the checkout line, or passing by a building on the way home that sparks your architectural curiosity.
So much of innovation and insight is the work of happenstance. When we optimize for efficiency we extinguish the possibility of encounter with the unintended — a vital ingredient to the delicate recipe of human creativity. Efficiency and convenience are two the four horsemen of Rebecca Solnit’s apocalypse, along with profitability and security. “In their names,” she writes, in a favorite essay of mine, “crimes against poetry, pleasure, sociability, and the very largeness of the world are daily, hourly, constantly carried out.”
And of course, when we zoom out from our own individual perspective, we can see that there’s really nothing efficient about the massive amounts of waste created by outsourcing our errands to the internet. The optimization, in other words, is an illusion, and one we all pay for.
None of this is an argument against digital technology, by the way. But technology inevitably reshapes our experience, often in ways that transcend — or even contradict — the purposes of its designer. I’m saddened, for example, by the irony of so many “mindfulness” apps, which assault their users with advertisements for talks by famous teachers, inspirational quotes, and digital badges for being more mindful than the person next to you. I think, in this case, a simple egg timer would do just fine.
The urge to “never stop improving” (yikes) is a powerful hallmark of capitalism. But how can we train ourselves to recognize when our “solutions” are actually just attempts to solve a problem in one place by creating one somewhere else?
The baby and the bathwater: unintended consequences
A third problem with optimization is that we forget that most things are connected.
“When we strive to eradicate all the aspects of something we don’t like, we often end up cutting a cord that leads somewhere important.”
Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön warns against self-improvement projects that try to eliminate our “negative” qualities. Why? Because anger is just another face of passion. Lose the anger and you lose the passion. When we strive to eradicate all the aspects of something we don’t like, we often end up cutting a cord that leads somewhere important.
Before we start any sort of optimization process, we ought to ask ourselves the question: what is good here? What about this current model works? This will prevent us from inventing something that actually makes things more difficult.
The lightbulb case: when the bug is the solution
Consider another example: when LED (light-emitting diode) bulbs were popularized they were hailed for their ability to mitigate a phenomenon called “amber drift,” in which incandescent bulbs become increasingly yellow as you reduce their strength. Ever been in a restaurant when they dim the lights for dinner? That’s amber drift. The yellowing creates a natural warm glow, and all they have to do is turn down the intensity.
For years, theatrical lighting designers came to rely on this trick to create multiple color temperatures with a single set of lights. Have a scene that takes place outdoors? Boom: boost the intensity and you get a true blue-white light. When the characters head inside for the evening, you can lower the brightness to get those lovely amber tones.
When the newer LEDs were integrated into the lighting world, suddenly a designer needed two different lights to accomplish what they used to be able to accomplish with just one. The precision, in other words, had eroded the tool’s prior effectiveness.
The more human solution
Now, back to the fish. I know what you’re thinking: couldn’t I have just cooked the salmon for less time? The answer is I could have. The other answer is I never have.
Machines are rational, humans are not. There’s a reason I keep overcooking the fish. It’s not because I don’t know how to do it, or because my oven isn’t precise enough. If anything it’s the opposite: my ability to have total control over the situation kept me fixed in habit, and prevented me from encountering the error of my own logic.
When we assume that the users of machines and systems will behave rationally we miss the possibility that a healthy dose of malfunction may be just what’s needed to shift our perspective. We think that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. It’s not. In physics, logistics, and emotions, we should never underestimate the power of a meaningful detour.
Putting design to work for us
Today’s technology is designed to be “frictionless,” meaning there are minimal obstacles standing between you and the completion of an outcome. This is a blessing when it comes to something like depositing a check or scheduling an appointment. But frictionlessness is also how we will slide on through experiences that aren’t good for us, like spending or eating more than we intended.
I recently installed a feature on my phone specifically for the purpose of creating friction: every time I open my most-habit forming apps, this one pops up with a message asking, “do you really need to?” Another way I create friction is by not having a dedicated parking space for my car. Having to walk between my home and my car forces to consider whether I really need to drive, or whether I might hop on my bike instead. Of course, this won’t work for everyone. For people with mobility disabilities, added friction related to transit is not helpful. Recall that hostile architecture is also an example of friction. The value of friction is always dependent on the needs of the individual.
The other miscalculation we make is assuming that we ought to be able to make good use of things because we invented them. The truth is that some of our inventions are woefully maladapted for human use, while others are totally over-developed. I recently came across this striking quote from the biologist E.O. Wilson: “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.”
What does he mean by this? Our emotional life is ancient; we are calibrated for survival, sometimes in ways that prevent us from thinking or acting more flexibly. Meanwhile, our institutions haven’t caught up with the progress of our minds and our technology is so advanced that we can’t actually make good use of it much of the time. Sure: we may be able to have thousands of Facebook friends, but what’s the point of that when research shows our minds can only handle about 150 meaningful connections?
Stop optimizing
To all this, I say: it’s time to stop optimizing. Embrace the good enough. We need to recognize our own quirks, biases, and miscalculations. And we need to design systems that meet those very human circumstances: nothing less, and nothing more.
I know it’s tempting to want to constantly improve: to find better, smarter, and faster ways of accomplishing our goals. But it’s so easy to lose track of what (and whom) we are optimizing for.
Sometimes the best thing we can do — as leaders, designers, innovators — is leave something alone. Gardeners and parents know well the benefits of benign neglect, the power of resisting the urge to meddle in a functioning system.
When we do, we may just find the solution we were seeking is closer than we thought. Take it from me and my rusty old oven, when you find something that is just good enough to get you where you want to go, that feeling is truly *chef’s kiss*.
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