“Being busy isn’t the same as being useful but it’s amazing how many businesses confuse the two.”

There’s a phrase I hear far too often in boardrooms and strategy sessions: “We just need to be more efficient.”

It sounds reasonable. Who doesn’t want things to run faster, smoother, cheaper? But here’s the quiet truth most leaders eventually learn – efficiency doesn’t always equal effectiveness.

In fact, the wrong kind of efficiency can quietly become your biggest obstacle to progress.

The Modern Obsession with Speed

We live in a culture that worships speed. Fast decisions, rapid growth, instant results, the language of modern business reads like a race.

Dashboards flash real-time updates, teams chase quarterly numbers, and “quick wins” become a permanent strategy. Everyone’s moving fast. But not everyone’s moving in the right direction.

I’ve walked into so many organisations where speed became a substitute for strategy.
Teams were so focused on doing things faster that no one stopped to ask, “Are we still doing the right things?”

“If you don’t know where you’re going, being faster just means getting lost sooner.”

When Efficiency Becomes the Enemy

Efficiency starts as a noble goal – remove waste, streamline effort, automate tasks. But unchecked, it can morph into something dangerous: efficiency for efficiency’s sake.

Here’s what that looks like in real life:

• The Process Paradox: Teams spend months “optimising” a process that should have been replaced altogether.
• Automation Overload: Tools built to save time create more work maintaining the tools themselves.
• The Meeting Factory: Weekly check-ins, status updates, and “syncs” designed to keep everyone aligned end up devouring everyone’s week.
• Speed Over Sense: Decisions made in haste solve the immediate issue but multiply future problems.

And yet, from the outside, everything looks busy, which, in many companies, is mistaken for success.

The Efficiency Trap

The irony of chasing efficiency is that it can make an organisation fragile. When you optimise every resource, reduce every buffer, and push every system to its limit, you remove the flexibility that resilience depends on.

Think of it like this: A Formula 1 car is efficient at racing but one pebble on the track can send it spinning. A Land Rover, on the other hand, might be slower, but it can adapt to changing terrain.

In business, many leaders unknowingly build Formula 1 organisations when what they really need is a Land Rover, a company designed for endurance, not just acceleration.

“You can’t optimise your way out of uncertainty, you can only build the capacity to navigate it.”

The Psychology Behind It

So why do smart, experienced leaders fall for the myth of efficiency?

Because it feels good. Efficiency creates the illusion of control. It’s measurable, trackable, and tangible. You can see speed; you can’t always see sense.

When a company is under pressure, efficiency becomes a comfort zone.

• “Let’s tighten processes.”
• “Let’s add another report.”
• “Let’s automate that.”

These all sound like responsible moves, and sometimes they are. But too often, they’re symptoms of something deeper: a fear of pausing to think.

Clarity takes time. Efficiency hates time.

So teams rush. And rush. Until speed itself becomes the story.

A Familiar Story

A global client once asked me to audit their customer success operations. They were proud of their efficiency, everything was tracked, measured, and automated. Their CRM system had more dashboards than users. And yet, customer satisfaction was dropping.

When we looked closer, we found that “efficiency” had stripped out the human moments that mattered. Automated responses replaced meaningful interactions. Ticket targets became more important than solving problems. The team was efficient, but not effective.

We slowed things down. Reintroduced human review for certain customer segments. Cut unnecessary automations. Within three months, resolution times increased slightly, but satisfaction scores rose dramatically. Renewals followed.

The client learned something profound: you can’t measure care in seconds.

The Illusion of Progress

One of the greatest traps in business is confusing motion with momentum. You can run at full speed on a treadmill and still be in the same place.

Efficiency creates motion. Effectiveness creates momentum.

When leaders ask, “Why aren’t we growing faster?” the answer is often: “Because you’re spending too much energy running in place.”

“You can’t scale chaos — but you can certainly make it run faster.”

The Real Measure of Efficiency

True efficiency isn’t about doing more. It’s about removing friction from the things that actually matter.

That starts with asking some uncomfortable questions:

• What are we trying to achieve, and does this process help us get there?
• Are we simplifying or just shifting complexity around?
• What would happen if we stopped doing this altogether?

At Vani Malik Consulting, we often find that 30 – 40% of internal effort is spent maintaining activity that no longer adds value. Meetings, reports, tools – all once useful, now habitual.

When we strip them back, the results are rarely smaller. They’re clearer.

From Speed to Sense

Here’s what balanced efficiency looks like:

1. Clarity Before Speed: Every process should start with why. Optimising a weak process just helps you fail faster.
2. Focus on the Bottleneck, Not the Busyness: In any system, one constraint limits growth. Find it, fix it, and let the rest follow.
3. Automate Intelligently: Automate repetitive, low-value tasks, not decisions, empathy, or accountability.
4. Protect Thinking Time: Quiet time isn’t wasted time. It’s where the best strategic decisions are made.
5. Measure What Matters: Don’t measure speed alone, measure satisfaction, retention, and long-term outcomes.

Leadership and the Myth of Efficiency

As leaders, we send signals every day through our calendars, our questions, our reactions.

If your first question in every review is “How fast did we deliver?”, don’t be surprised when your team optimises for speed at the expense of sense.

If instead you ask, “What did we learn? What did we improve?”, you build a culture that values thinking over ticking boxes.

Clarity in leadership isn’t about micromanaging, it’s about creating space for better judgment.

“A calm mind makes faster progress than a busy one.”

A Better Word Than Efficiency

Perhaps we should stop talking about efficiency altogether. The word has lost its meaning.

What we should really be aiming for is elegance, it is the simplest, smartest way to achieve a purpose.
Elegance allows for speed, but it’s built on understanding, not urgency.

It’s what happens when you align people, process, and purpose, not just performance metrics.

When efficiency becomes elegant, you don’t have to push harder. You just flow better.

Final Thought

The real myth of efficiency is that faster is always better. But speed without direction is just distraction in motion.

The leaders who win are the ones who pause long enough to see clearly before they accelerate. They don’t chase time, they design it.

At Vani Malik Consulting, we help organisations stop running faster in the wrong direction and start moving smarter in the right one. Because clarity isn’t slow, it’s strategic. And strategy, done right, never wastes time.

“Efficiency is getting things done right. Effectiveness is getting the right things done.”
 – Peter Drucker