The most efficient path between two points is the shortest, the straight line. Then why is the common housefly unable to approach its goal straight? Why does it go round and round in a spiralling circle as it comes to its destination?
Given its eye and body structure, the fly has to adapt itself to reach its goal; it gets to its goal in a way that is effective for the circumstance, even if it is not an efficient way. The fly has two large eyes, so large that they cover most of its head. The fly can simultaneously see up, down, forward and backwards. The fly’s eye comprises about 4,000 tiny, hexagonally packed lenses. No two lenses point in the same direction. Not only that, each lens operates quite independently of the others.
The flip side to this 360-degree vision is that a fly-eye view of the world is highly fractured; the fly cannot easily adjust for distance or see detailed patterns and shapes. Hence the fly does not have any sharp vision. It has what biologist calls a compound eye; Human have a simple eye.
The Human eye sees one large image; the fly sees the same tiny image in each of its several thousand lenses. As the fly approaches an object, the image shifts slightly in each facet. To hold its vision of the object in a stable position, the fly has to adjust its whole body. At each turn of its body, the fly is closer to the object, so the radius of the circle of approaches progressively becomes smaller and smaller. If one plots the approach path of the fly, it would resemble a coil or a spiral with a decreasing radius. So the fly has to move around in circles.
In human management, managers are trained to be efficient. In their pursuit of efficiency, they sometimes lose their effectiveness. So the question arises, are efficiency and effectiveness different?
All our training tells us to plan for efficient outcomes and expect the organisation to move along a straight line. Our desire for a secure future makes us want to get control of the uncertainty around us. We carve for predictability, to avoid surprises and to be in command of events rather than let events be in command of our lives. For any educational or social training imparted to our children, we constantly motivate them to be efficient. If they achieve efficiency, they are assumed to be effective. We expect them to solve problems by developing options and choosing the most efficient way.
