The Dipsea Demon

I'm impressed with Christopher McDougall's book "Born to Run." Being a self-taught efficiency expert, I often grapple with misplaced efficiencies, like the often sub-optimal applications of Six Sigma techniques. What often happens, is that our natural need for efficiency often forces us to lose sight of a larger system. Making sub-systems efficient usually wrecks big organizations.

The classic example is manufacturing, where the goal of "economies of scale" drives the rational purchase of large specialized machines, which do one thing extremely and efficiently well. These require maintenance, and worse, increase the need for buffers of inventory. This overhead even changes organizational thinking, which now values inventory to the extent that cost-accounting treats it as an asset.

I like "Born to Run" because it takes us down a beautifully groomed running trail to justify that humans evolved to our current state because of our ability to run--not faster than our prey, but longer. The theory presented is that our brains evolved to track, and our lungs and legs evolved differently than Neanderthals, in such a way that we could keep a nice 10K pace and run a deer to exhaustion.

But our brain evolution conflicted with our physical evolution in this way: "...we have a body built for performance, but a brain that's always looking for efficiency."

That strive for efficiency is our downfall. We optimize small parts but ignore it's impact on the whole. I know Lean experts who make a lot of money because they know how to easily spot badly applied efficiencies. They tell me as soon as you lose line-of-sight in a process, waste will creep in, unnoticed by anyone within the system--all due to the quest for "efficiency."

So what does this have to do with the Dipsea Demon? Jack Kirk (1906-2007) was a loner and a curmudgeon who ran up until he was 96 years old. He had a quote in "Born to Run" that kicked off this rant:

"You don't stop running because you get old, you get old because you stop running."

That's the kind of holistic thinking that is missing today. It's missed because of our genetic need to optimize and make efficient everything in sight. The problem is that we lose sight of what we impact if we can't see the whole.

I'm Roy Obadiah and these are my rants.