this Ted Talk Features writer and entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan recorded live at Ted Summit 2019. Like Ted talks, you should check out the Ted Radio Hour with NPR. Stay tuned after this talk to hear sneak peek of this week's episode. Recently, the leadership team of on American Supermarket chain decided that their business needed to get a lot more efficient, so they embrace their digital transformation with zeal. Out went the team supervising Meet Veg Bakery, and in came an algorithmic task Allocator. Now, instead of people working together, each employee went clocked in, got assigned a task. Did it came back for more. This was scientific management on steroids, standardizing and allocating work. It was super efficient.

Well, not quite because the task Allocator didn't know when a customer was going to drop a box of eggs couldn't predict when some crazy kid was gonna knock over a display, or when the local high school decided that everybody needed to bring in coconuts the next day. Efficiency works really well when you can predict exactly what you're going to need. But when the a normal US or unexpected comes along, kids, customers, coconuts, well, then, efficiency is no longer your friend. This has become a really crucial issue, this ability to deal with the unexpected because the unexpected is becoming the norm. It's why experts in forecasters are reluctant to predict anything more than 400 days out. Why? Because over the last 20 or 30 years,

much of the world has gone from being complicated to being complex. Which means that yes, there are patterns, but they don't repeat themselves regularly. It means that very small changes can make a disproportionate impact. And it means that expertise won't always suffice because the system's just keeps changing too fast. So what's that means is that there's a huge amount in the world that kind of defies for costing. Now it's why the Bank of England will say Yes, there will be another crash, but we don't know why or when we know that climate change is real, but we can't predict where forest fires will break out, and we don't know which factories are going to flood. It's why companies are blindsided when plastic straws and bags and bottled water go from staples to rejects overnight and baffled when a change in social mores turned stars into pariahs and colleagues into out costs. Ineradicable uncertainty in an environment that defies so much for costing efficiency won't just not help us. It's specifically undermines and erodes our capacity to adapt and respond. So if efficiency is no longer our guiding principle,

how should we address the future? What kind of thinking is really going to help us? What sort of talents was must we be sure to defend? I think that we're in the past. We used to think a lot about just in time management. Now we have to start thinking about just in case, preparing for events that are generally certain but specifically remain ambiguous. One example of this is the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness. Steffy. We know there will be more epidemics in future, but we don't know where or when or what. So we can't plan. But we can prepare. So said these developing multiple vaccines for multiple diseases, knowing that they can predict which vaccines were going to work or which diseases will break out so some of those vaccines will never be used. That's inefficient,

but it's robust because it provides more options, and it means that we don't depend on a single technological solution. Epidemic responsiveness also depends hugely on people who know and trust each other. But those relationships take time to develop time that is always in short supply when an epidemic breaks out. So Sethi's developing relationships friendships, alliances now, knowing that some of those may never be used, that's inefficient. A waste of time, perhaps, but it's robust. You can see robust thinking, and financial service is, too. In the past, banks used to hold much less capital than they're required to today because holding so little capital being too efficient with it is what made the bank so fragile in the first place.

Now, holding Maur Capital looks and is inefficient, but its robust because it protects the financial system against surprises. Countries that are really serious about climate change know that they have to adopt multiple solutions. Multiple forms of renewable energy not just won. The countries that are most advanced have been working for years now, changing their water and food supply in health care systems because they recognize that by the time they have certain prediction, that information may very well come too late. You can take the same approach to trade wars and many countries do instead of depending on a single, huge trading partner. They try to be everybody's friends because they know they can't predict which markets might suddenly become unstable. It's time consuming and expensive negotiating all these deals, but its robust because it makes their whole economy better defended against shocks. It's particularly a strategy adopted by small countries that no, they'll never have the market muscle to call the shots. So it's just better to have too many friends.

But if your stock in one of these organizations that still kind of captured by the efficiency myth how do you start to change it? Try some experiments in the Netherlands. Homecare Nursing used to be run pretty much like the supermarket, standardized and prescribed work to the minute nine minutes on Monday, seven minutes on Wednesday, eight minutes on Friday. The nurses hated it, so one of thumb you lost a block proposed an experiment. Since every patient's different, we don't quite know exactly what they'll need. Why don't we just leave it to the nurses to decide? Sounds reckless. In his experiment, Yas found the patients got better in half the time, and costs fell by 30%. When I ask just what it surprised him about his experiment,

he just kind of lost. And he said, Well, I had no idea it could be so easy to find such a huge improvement because this isn't the kind of thing you can know or predict sitting at a desk or staring at a computer screen. So now this form of nursing has proliferated across the Netherlands and around the world. But in every new country it still starts with experiments because each place is slightly and unpredictably different. Of course, not all experiments work. You also tried a similar approach to the fire service and found it didn't work because the service is just too centralized. Failed experiments look inefficient, but they're often the only way you can figure out how the real world works. So now he's trying teachers bargain. His experiments like that require creativity and no, a little bravery in the in England, he's about to say in the UK in England, it's okay in England,

the leading rugby team, one of the leading rugby teams, is Saracens, about the manager on the coach there realized that all the physical training that they do in the data driven conditioning that they do has become generic. Really, all the teams do exactly the same thing, so they risked an experiment. They took the whole team away, even in match season, on ski trips and to look at social projects in Chicago. This is expensive. It was time consuming, and it could be a little risky putting a whole bunch of rugby players on a ski slope. But what they found was that the players came back with renewed bonds of loyalty and solidarity. And now, when they're on the pitch under incredible pressure,

they manifest what the manager calls poise. I, ah, unflinching, unwavering dedication to each other. Their opponents are in all of this, but still to enthrall, to efficiency, to try it at a London Tech company. Ver of the CEO measures just about everything that moves, but she couldn't find anything that made any difference to the company's productivity. So she devised an experiment that she calls Love Week the whole week, where each employee has to look for really clever, helpful, imaginative things that a counterpart does call it out and celebrate it. It takes a huge amount of time and effort.

Lots of people would call it distracting, but it really energizes the business and makes the whole company more productive. Preparedness Coalition Building Imagination Experiments, Bravery in an unpredictable age, thes are tremendous sources of resilience and strength. They aren't efficient, but they give us limitless capacity for adaptation, variation and invention. And the less we know about the future, the more we're going to need these tremendous sources of human messy, unpredictable skills. But in our grind, dependence on technology were asset stripping those skills every time we use technology to ne just threw a decision or a choice, or to interpret how somebody's feeling where the guide us through a conversation, we outsourced to a machine what we could can do ourselves. And it's an expensive trade off.

The more we let machines think for us, the less we can sink for ourselves. They won't. The more time doctors spend staring at digital medical records, the less time they spend looking at their patients. The more you we use parenting APS, the less we know our kids. The more time we spend with people that were predicted and programmed toe like, the less we can connect with people who are different from ourselves and the less compassion we need, the less compassion we have. What all of these technologies attempt to do is to force fit a standardized model of a predictable reality onto a world that is infinitely surprising. What gets left out, anything that can't be measured, which is just about everything that counts. Our growing dependence on technology risks us becoming less skilled, Maur vulnerable to the deep and growing complexity of the real world.

Now, as I was thinking about the extremes of stress in turbulence that we know we will have to confront, I went and I talked to a number of chief executives whose own businesses had gone through existential crises when they teetered on the brink of collapse. These were frank, gut wrenching conversations. Many men wept, just remembering. So I awesome what kept you going through this? And they all had exactly the same answer. It wasn't a date over technology, they said it was my friends and my colleagues who kept me going. One added. It was pretty much the opposite of the gig economy. But then I went and I talked to a group of young rising executives, and I asked them who? Your friends at work and they just looked blank.

There's no time. They're too busy. It's not efficient who, I wondered, is going to give them imagination and stamina and bravery when the storms come. Anyone who tries to tell you that they know the future is just trying to own it, a spurious kind of manifest destiny. The harder, deeper truth is that the future is uncharted, that we can't map it till we get there. But that's okay because we have so much imagination if we use it. We have deep talents of inventiveness and exploration. If we apply them, we are brave enough to invent things we've never seen before. Lose those skills and we are adrift. But hone and develop them.

We could make any future witches. Thank you for more Ted talks. Ted dot com Covert 19 has upended our lives, shaken us from all sense of security. When it comes to pandemics, we just are in this cycle of panic and complacency. We'll see if this one puts an end to that. I'm Manu. She's, um, a roadie. How could we change the way we think about pandemics and protect ourselves against future global outbreaks. That's next time on the Ted Radio hour from NPR. Subscribe or listen to the Ted Radio hour wherever you get your podcasts,

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