Intentional Inefficiency

I think a great and often under realized leadership skill is the ability to leave a little room.

Sahil Bloom describes what he calls routine anxiety in his article “My 90-10 Rule For Routines”. Routine anxiety is the stress that shows up when life gets in the way of a perfectly optimized morning. After a career in HR, I honestly don’t know what a perfectly optimized morning is and often feel like I need to leave 90% open for the unexpected. Anywho, I digress. His fix is a 90-10 split, 90% locked-in structure and 10% left open for the unexpected and the “good enough” days. He points to research from Sharif and Shu showing that people who build in planned flexibility hit their goals up to 40% more often than people with rigid plans, and that they recover faster after a miss. I love the point he makes of “the best routine is the one you can break.” I understand this concept, but I was also the child in middle school who color coded her assignment notebook, so there’s that.

Debra Gittler makes the point in “Chapter 4: Leadership in these times of AI” that the bottleneck in organization’s used to be the capacity to produce, but now it’s the capacity to absorb. AI can draft, analyze and problem-solve for us, which means a lot of us can now do alone what used to take a conversation. Her point is that culture, relationships and deliberation can’t be outsourced, because the people next to us bring their own experience and their own stake in what happens next. She asks leaders to sit with the question “where do we want to maintain the inefficiencies?” I absolutely LOVE this question. It really made me think about the value of intentional inefficiency. I would argue that without intentional inefficiency, we end up with fast organizations that don’t absorb anything. When I look back at the transformation initiatives throughout my career that were the most impactful and successful, it was rarely the ones that moved the fastest, it was the ones that moved most intentionally. 

On “The Framework for Leading With Both Care and Accountability” from the Curiosity Shop podcast with Brené Brown and Adam Grant, leadership coach Aiko Bethea coaches Brené live on a real leadership conflict using her Anchored, Aligned, and Accountable framework. Two things really stood out to me from that conversation. The first is incredibly challenging but so important, it is slowing down enough to make a call based on your values instead of the urgency of the moment. Second, the difference between assuming good intent and believing someone is doing their best, which changes how accountability actually works. It's easy to treat those two things as the same thing. Assuming good intent is about motive, that the person didn't set out to cause a problem. Believing someone is doing their best is a different bar, and a harder one, because it asks me to look at what they're working with (their capacity, their context, everything on their plate that I can't see) instead of just the gap between what I expected and what I got. I can assume good intent and still have a real conversation about a missed commitment, because good intent doesn't erase the impact. When I believe someone is doing their best, the question shifts from "why didn't you" to "what's getting in the way, and what do you need from me?" A common worry that leaders have is that if they lead with care, they're not holding their team accountable. Not true. Some people hear “believe they’re doing their best” and think it means you excuse the missed deadline, skip the hard conversation, and lower the bar. That’s the fear you’re speaking to. The commitment was still missed, and you still talk about it. What changes is how you open the conversation. “Why didn’t you do this?” assumes the person was careless or didn’t try. “What’s getting in the way, and what do you need from me?” starts from the belief that they were working at their limit, so you look for the obstacle instead of looking for blame. The standard is the same, but you get to the real problem faster, and the person is less likely to get defensive and shut down.

Many leaders treat the two as a dial, where more care means less accountability and the reverse. Good leaders can hold both fully at once. Care without accountability turns into letting things slide. Accountability without care turns into blame. Strong leadership has both.

Pause and reflect

As we head into the weekend, take a minute to reflect on a few things.

1. 01If your calendar is 90% locked in, what’s one thing you could leave open this weekend, and what might you notice with that room?
2. 02Think of a change or initiative on your plate right now. Are you giving the people involved enough time to actually absorb it, or just enough time to complete it?
3. 03

   Where on your team are you protecting a little inefficiency on purpose, and where has speed quietly squeezed out something that mattered?

I’ll leave you with this

“Where do we want to maintain the inefficiencies?”

Andrea

Full transparency, I’m not the source of these ideas. Every week I pull together what I’m reading, listening to, and learning from some of the smartest voices in leadership and AI, and I tag every one so you can go to the source (please do). What I like to do is connect the dots on what I’m seeing out in the world.