there’s simply no way around the fact that we’re pretty fed up with a certain philosophical framework in Silicon Valley. It has many names: the growth mindset. OKRs. KPIs. Even Minimalism — the predominant aesthetic of our era. But at its core, it all comes down to one thing: the relentless optimization of everything in our world.

this mindset has... See more

5. Optimization diminishes our humanity.

Our myopic obsession with efficiency and the optimize-everything (including our self) mindset forces us into consistent, productive, linear beings when in fact we are human because we are not. We need businesses to design for non-linear, non-binary, inconsistent, incoherent selves.

“Think of efficiency as a high-performance engine. Under perfect conditions, it delivers maximum power and minimum waste. However, that very efficiency makes it less robust. Highly efficient systems have no slack, no redundancy, and therefore no resilience and no spare capacity.” — Helen Lewis, The Atlantic, 26 March 2020