I recently had a discussion with a very senior person, head of product development for a fairly big MNC s/w company. He said he cared about only 2 things – efficiency and effectiveness!

After the meeting I just wondered what does this mean??

As I understand, efficiency means more output for same given input or same output with lesser input! You want your teams to be more efficient (aka productivity improvements). Which means the team should deliver more throughput every month / release / sprint….whatever is the desired unit of time!

Well, then – Akshay Kumar’s 10 movies are released in a year, or Kumar Sanu sang hundreds of songs in a year! So, here also, there is more output for same input! These also seem to be examples of efficient celebrities 🙂

So, now what does effectiveness mean? I think it means the output you produced needs to be more and more effective. The output delivered should be impactful. In other words, the output needs to be of better and better quality! But then, quality output needs time!

E.g. Amir Khan’s 1 movie only is released in a year, but people look forward to it! Madan Mohan didn’t have a factory of songs, but his creations are अजरामर 🙂

Then it seems like, if you want to deliver an effective output, you will deliver less! But then if you deliver lesser, you are not productive! On the contrary, if you try to be more fast, the output will not be effective!

So then, are these contradicting?? Seems like yes!

But now, an example of Toyota comes to our mind. They seem to be effective as well as very efficient! It doesn’t seem to contradict here, rather in this example, these two seem to go hand in hand! How come??….

Somewhere I had read that Toyota spent months to get their stuff right before the first car came out of their plant. And then onwards, it has been years of तपश्चर्या and focused attention to become more and more effective every day (Kaizen), even though it appears to be slowing you down! But having patience and confidence….

I think this is how the journey goes. You go slow, have patience but continuous attention to improve, almost every day. This will make you effective. And once you are effective, efficiency will be just the by-product! Go slow to go fast! Needs patience, though 🙂

I can relate this to almost all scrum teams that I have come across so far. Teams don’t do “retrospectives” with full faith & focus to improve their “effectiveness”. Sometimes, teams don’t do retrospectives, claiming that they can finish more work in that much time 🙂 This is exactly opposite – going fast to go slow!

– चिंगुडे