Lazy isn’t a moral failing. It’s an economic consideration.
We have limited time, limited energy and limited resources. Allocating that effort is often done in response to what’s at stake and what’s on offer.
The clean room at a silicon fab or operating theater is clean because everyone involved puts in a lot of effort to keep it that way. And that effort is expensive.
It’s not efficiency or precision. Those are important on their own. The gap between laziness and not-lazy requires effort in the face of nuance, challenges or frustrations.
The staff at Motel 6 will put less effort into each guest’s requests than at the Ritz down the street because there’s a lot more staff per person at the Ritz.
There’s organizational laziness, in which a system is designed to have each person care a bit less about each task in exchange for completing more tasks, and there’s individual laziness, which is the natural consequence of disrespectful management.
If the boss insists on non-lazy behavior, but doesn’t give the team the time, the training, the tools or the compensation to do so, it’s not going to happen, not in the long run. Over time, not-lazy is rarely free.
AI bots have an economic incentive to do as little as they can get away with, and so do we. Programmers around the world are frustrated that coding bots almost solve the problem, but don’t seem to care enough to put in the extra cycles to get it right. But that’s what we’re (not) paying for.
The mismatches are frustrating. We might be delighted when we get not-lazy responses that we didn’t pay for, but it ruins a brand or a project when the effort we expected from a system or a person doesn’t match what we think we paid for.
Some clarifying questions:
Are our customers already paying for the non-lazy option? Or do they think they should be getting it for free?
If we wanted to disrupt our competitors by being the non-lazy option, what would we have to do and how could we communicate that?
How can we manage systems, processes and people so they have the resources and rewards they need to take the non-lazy approach?
If we’re trapped or pushed into the lazy path, how can we build systems so that laziness doesn’t damage our work?
How much extra could we change for not-lazy? And are we prepared to keep that promise?
“You’ll pay a bit more but you’ll get more than you paid for” is almost always a winning market position.
