Efficiency or Efficacy: what would you choose?
Straight to the point here: sorry, that's the wrong question. Not necessarily because there isn't some sort of possible hierarchy between the two. I don't believe anyone in their right mind would argue against efficacy being the ultimate goal in a (digital) product development context. Meaning that without that being the right thing, solving the right problem, there isn't much else to talk about!
But here's the catch, and why I don't quite like it when anyone suggests that there is a kind of dichotomy between the two:
Unless you have a magical crystal ball, it’s quite likely you don’t know for sure whether investing in developing something will turn out as planned. It’s not even likely it will be used for, and in the way it was conceived (which can actually be a good thing).
That’s why there’s something about experimentation being the new planning (something I heard someone saying in a podcast, but unfortunately didn't keep the name to give credit). Accept that reality and be ready to operate in that complex environment.
Product development is ultimately about experimentation and empiricism (learning through feedback loops which hypotheses are proven or discarded). That inherent complexity in a digital context imposes both a challenge and a (huge) opportunity. The latter because it's in the realm of (nearly) infinite possibilities (being "soft"ware, so easy to change). The former, because that also means you can too easily get distracted pulling (or being pulled) in all kinds of directions.
This is a very simple sketch of how one can think about it:
At the moment we position efficiency as an "either/or" against efficacy, we are missing the link that can be an enabler to success by allowing us to quickly iterate and thus accelerate the cycle of learning. Unless you’re willing to have too many odds against you, being subject to sheer luck.
Another enabler is how we go about taking things in perspective of what we are trying to achieve from a business results angle, then changing what kind of behavior (outcome) we believe will create those results, then eventually doing something. This is how I like currently to visualize that:
And again, going downwards to the lower part, when we are driving clarity by prioritizing the hypotheses that we believe have a bigger chance to succeed, or simply testing something, then executing the designed output, that's precisely the realm of efficiency. Going back upward, monitoring and adapting, that is where we evaluate whether efficacy is achieved or not.
Simple yet extremely hard to master. It's all that experimental and empirical nature coming about…
I don't mean to "over-engineer" this post, but there's likely even more nuance in how to look at the output we are trying to achieve based on the efforts we are putting in (out of which efficiency and efficacy are two patterns), which I think has some interesting connection here as well. This is something I wrote in a small sequence of two posts before (here and there). In the second post, I took a stab at visualizing that against a product lifecycle in an attempt to reflect on the interplay of the different patterns in the contexts of the phases:
The real world is messy and nuanced. It's good to recognize that, so to better think about handling it so that ourselves are being effective, ultimately.
By Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect (I only refuse invites from people clearly with an agenda to ‘coldly’ sell something to me), happy to engage and interact