Effectiveness and Anecdote

Noticed during last week that the downloads for SEMPER and SCORE suddenly spiked for a couple of days, and found out why: my colleagues at Anecdote, down in Melbourne, had mentioned the book on their blog.

The section that Mark Schenck quoted (and Shawn Callahan also kindly re-quoted on his Plaxo cross-link) was my definition of effectiveness:

Effectiveness consists of, or arises from, four distinct dimensions, plus another sort-of dimension that ties the others together:

  • efficient – makes the best use of available resources
  • reliable – can be relied upon to deliver the required results
  • elegant – supports the human factors in the context
  • appropriate – suports and sustains the overall purpose
  • integrated – linked to and supports integration of the whose as whole

The point here is that efficiency is neither the same as effectiveness, nor separate from it, but a subset of what’s needed for overall effectiveness.

In the comments to the Anecdote post, Patrick Lambe added:

I add resilience/adaptiveness… the ability to respond productively to changes in the environment.

Good point – duly noted, though I’d perhaps argue that resilience and adaptiveness are outcomes of paying attention to those dimensions of effectiveness, rather than separate dimensions in their own right.

The only mild annoyance was one of timing: they posted it just after I’d replaced the full content of the book with the stripped-down ‘sample-preview’, but before the new links from IT Governance for the saleable e-books have arrived, so there’s not that much that’s been available on either site. Oh well.

But Anecdote are some of the key thought-leaders on narrative-knowledge and its application in business, so that blog-post is much appreciated: thanks guys! 🙂

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