In the language of management, few words enjoy a better reputation than efficiency. For over a century, organisations have sought to reduce waste, eliminate redundancies, simplify procedures and accelerate decision-making. The ideal business is often imagined as a perfectly designed machine, in which every component performs its function with the lowest possible consumption of resources.
This approach has produced extraordinary results. It has made it possible to build industrial systems of immense complexity, global supply chains and production processes capable of achieving levels of quality unthinkable only a few decades ago.
In recent years, however, several disciplines have begun to suggest that efficiency is not necessarily the most important criterion for understanding intelligent systems.
The suboptimal brain
An interesting example comes from neuroscience. In an article published in 2026 in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Fakhar and colleagues argue that the human brain is not an optimal system from an engineering perspective. On the contrary, it appears to be the outcome of a long evolutionary history of compromises, successive adaptations, redundancies and local solutions accumulated over time (Fakhar et al., 2026).
Many features of the brain do indeed seem difficult to justify in terms of rational design. There are apparently inefficient connections, indirect pathways, functional duplications and a considerable dependence on structures inherited from past evolution: an engineer tasked with designing a cognitive system from scratch would probably not build it this way. Yet the brain remains the most versatile cognitive system we know.
The authors draw from this the rhetorical suggestion that perhaps intelligence emerges not so much from the optimisation of individual parts as from the capacity to integrate an enormous number of components, however imperfect in isolation, into a coherent system.
The suboptimal organisation
This observation becomes particularly interesting when applied to organisations because, for much of their history, businesses have been understood through a mechanical metaphor. The organisation was conceived as a machine made up of specialised parts, each of which had to be optimised separately. From this perspective, the task of management was to identify and correct every inefficiency.
But modern organisations resemble machines far less than they do collective cognitive systems. Competent and brilliant people, or individual departments that are hyper-efficient but not integrated, have no positive effect on the organisation's overall performance. The organisation creates value because it can coordinate interpretations, share meanings, integrate different perspectives and construct shared representations of reality. Value emerges from the quality of the relationships that connect them.
For this reason, when we look at a single business function, many activities may appear inefficient. Long meetings, overlapping expertise, elaborate decision-making pathways, informal communication networks and duplicated procedures often seem ideal candidates for rationalisation. Yet what appears inefficient at a local level may serve a fundamental function at a systemic level.
Apparently redundant expertise may represent a form of organisational memory. A duplicated process may provide a control mechanism that prevents serious errors. An informal network of relationships may allow knowledge to circulate in ways that no organisational chart can represent. A discussion that slows down a decision may significantly improve the quality of collective interpretation. To apply what has been said to an understanding of organisations, we might say that a complex system, such as an organisation, possesses properties that cannot be understood by observing its individual components in isolation.
Emergence
In the complexity sciences, this phenomenon is known as emergence. Emergent properties belong not to the parts but to the relationships between them. Consciousness is not found in a single neuron. The capacity to innovate is not found in a single employee. Both emerge from the integration of multiple elements within a larger structure. This implies that the systematic elimination of inefficiencies can have unexpected negative effects.
The risk of optimisation
When an organisation reduces all redundancies, it simultaneously eliminates part of its own resilience. When it minimises every overlap in expertise, it reduces its capacity to absorb unforeseen shocks. When it standardises every process, it risks compromising its capacity to generate new interpretations.
Many of the organisational crises of recent years can be read from this perspective. Global supply chains built according to criteria of maximum efficiency proved extremely vulnerable during unexpected events. Companies that had eliminated all excess production capacity discovered that they no longer had any room to adapt. Organisations that had pursued maximum standardisation struggled to interpret radically new contexts. In every case, the problem was the loss of complexity.
The human brain offers an interesting lesson precisely because it seems to follow the opposite logic. Evolution has not built a system whose parts are as efficient as possible. It has built a system robust enough to keep functioning under widely differing conditions. Many of its apparent inefficiencies are the necessary price of adaptability, flexibility and the capacity to learn.
The same may hold within an organisation: a certain amount of redundancy may be the price of resilience. A certain amount of overlap may be the price of learning. A certain amount of slowness may be the price of understanding.
Of course, this does not mean that it is right to retain every inefficiency. There is real waste, there are management errors and there are needlessly costly processes. But not all inefficiencies belong to the same category: some consume resources without creating any value. Others provide the invisible support for emergent capacities that become apparent only when those inefficiencies are removed.
The attentive manager should do precisely this: understand which inefficiencies are integrated and fruitful, and which are sterile and costly, and do everything possible to preserve the former.
References
Fakhar, K., et al. (2026). Embracing the suboptimal organization of the human brain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 30(6).