Melissa Flagg, PhD
Efficiency is very tidy. In peacetime, in normal times, one can have organizational charts, spreadsheets, and proxy measures. One can measure those, check the boxes, and pretend they mean something. The boss is happy, the boss’s boss is happy; if this is a government program, everyone up to Congress is happy. Even if they aren’t happy, they are still funding the project, so who cares?
In peacetime, it is very nice to have centralized, tidy coordination that is planned so well into the future that one can project that there will be a breakthrough in experimental physics at 8 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time five years from last Wednesday.
Efficiency is the illusion of control. It is finding the quantifiable optimum solution, even if one must ignore some complexity to get there. It is developing a spreadsheet and inserting formulas and concluding that the highest return on investment would come from doing A, B, and D while avoiding C and E. Spending a lot of money on different approaches to a problem does not seem very cost effective.
But what if the problem is not well defined? What if the environment is guaranteed to change? What if there is an adversary who gets a vote on what will work? I’m not speaking only about war, but of any competition. Different approaches lend themselves to success in different environments, and one cannot assume the environment will never change—in fact, the only certain thing about the future is that it will be different than the present. One cannot know what will turn out to matter in the future. Committing completely to any single approach will almost necessarily make it the wrong approach, as it incentivizes an opponent to shift the basis of competition. This can turn out to be a dangerous false economy.
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