Efficient doesn't beat effective

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Efficient doesn't beat effective

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💡 Streamlining is smart—but outcomes matter more.

Who doesn't love efficiency? It’s the business world’s favourite buzzword. But here’s the truth:
Real performance isn’t about speed or scale. It’s about impact.

In today’s AI-driven world, all institutions - and the people in them - are under pressure to automate, optimise, and do more with less. But that doesn’t always make things better. Often, it just makes them
 faster. Or more complex.

đŸ€– True efficiency enables people to handle complexity without adding complication. But it can backfire. In the race to streamline, some companies are (unwittingly I'm sure) sacrificing customer experience: 70% of consumers would switch brands after just one frustrating AI chatbot interaction (Oracle, 2024).
The takeaway? Chasing efficiency through automation alone can break trust.

Yes please!

🧠 So what works? Human–AI complementarity.
Success isn’t just about what machines can do. It’s about where humans still matter most. Alongside a risk-of-substitution score and a potential-for-augmentation score, a 2024 MIT Sloan study - https://lnkd.in/e6ypQG3y - introduced EPOCH, a framework of five uniquely human strengths that resist automation and complement AI's inference excellence with (accurate and large) datasets. They are:
🧐 Empathy and Emotional Intelligence
📞 Presence, Networking, and Connectedness
⚖ Opinion, Judgment, and Ethics
🎹 Creativity and Imagination
đŸ«” Hope, Vision, and Leadership

But the research goes deeper. It also highlights where AI struggles:
đŸ‘ïž Making inferences from limited or biased data
đŸ«€ Solving open-ended, ethical, or ambiguous problems
đŸ€„Extrapolating beyond its training
💹 Building trust, relationships, or belief
đŸ«Ą Acting on a vision when the data doesn’t exist yet
👉 So instead of asking what AI can do, ask what only humans should do. Shift the lens from what machines can handle to asking 'where are humans irreplaceable?'

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📈 Bonus insight: Roles that score high in EPOCH traits saw the strongest employment growth from 2016 to 2023 (MIT Sloan, 2024).
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⚖ So what’s the play? Balance.
Efficiency isn’t wrong. But without effectiveness, it’s just motion. Thing is, it's not enough to just say you're doing it - you need to put some time in to really work out for each task and position what makes most sense over time, what keeps your joints buttery and flexible, and what will work best for the customer and brand.

Here’s a quick playbook to design for real impact:
✅ Support decision-making, not just workflows
✅ Surface insights fast—clarity beats dashboards
✅ Simplify the complex—don’t complicate it
✅ Free people to focus on outcomes, not admin


Let’s make effectiveness the metric that matters.
💬 Got thoughts on this? Drop them below.
🚀 Want to build a more persuasive, differentiated brand? Let’s talk.


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EPOCH paper is available at https://lnkd.in/e6ypQG3y. Authors are Professor Roberto Rigobon and postdoctoral associate Isabella Loaiza.