Many years ago, when I was an elementary school student, I devised a trick of calculation that greatly sped the work on a particular type of math assignment. Naturally, I shared the trick with my friends and classmates, and soon everyone had the same technique. The aggregate amount of time saved was quite staggering, and I found it extremely gratifying to consider that an innovation that took me perhaps ten minutes to conceive and implement could have such an enormously disproportionate positive impact.

Ever since that time, I have nurtured and developed a keen eye for optimizing processes and systems, particularly organization-level systems where many thousands or even millions of people will be using a methodology or an interface. At the same time, my work in the computer software industry has also taught me that premature optimization can cause problems larger in scope than the inefficiencies the optimization purports to fix. My economics background, meanwhile, informed me that for most situations to speak of an optimum is to grossly oversimplify; most systems and processes have many different functions or outcomes that can be optimized, and finding “the optimum” is in fact a balancing act between competing values – if we can even find out what the values are! Finding the best fit for “optimum”, it turns out, requires an enormous exercise of judgment (hopefully informed by experience) and, often, guesswork.

For example, my boyhood invention undoubtedly saved us endless tedium on our math worksheets – but, lacking a grounding in what the worksheets were trying to accomplish, I failed to understand that the practice was itself the point. We were doing the sheets to get practice with the mathematical rule we had just learned. My clever trick didn’t teach its practitioners anything – it just let them skip ahead to the right answer. As a one-off, that is sometimes a good thing. When we’re trying to learn, it’s a disaster. My “optimization” was in fact a body blow to the process of our class learning math! Someone optimizing for short-term student happiness would mark my idea as a brilliant success; someone optimizing for student learning would stamp with it with a fat red “F”.

Getting to optimum is not easy or trivial.