Trendcast: Biological Functionality Versus Mechanistic Perfection

The last issue of The Futurist to find my mailbox carried a seminal article about the trend toward toward "function" and away from "perfection." The article defined "perfection" as the mindset of the Industrial Revolution in which the challenge was to fine tune the machinery. It is in effect linear thinking. We can go in a straight line and create building blocks of perfection.

The Internet is changing this mechanical "perfection" worldview to a worldview of biological "function." The pursuit of mechanistic "perfection" requires, in effect, stable mass-production factories that dominate their environments.

The Internet, however, values dynamic resource networks/supply chains that couple, uncouple, and recouple at ever-faster rates of speed to align with "turbulent environments." The short lives of these networks/supply chains - under pressure from ever-faster changes around them -undermine "perfection." Nobody is around long enough to make things "perfect." For this reason, network/supply chain members tend to be "good enough" instead of "perfect."

My example is online teaching, a product of the Internet. I teach online, but most of us online teachers are part-time adjuncts. We live from term to term. We have no hiring guarantees. As a result, we tend to work for multiple vendors of online learning to assure income. The consequence is we are not around long enough to make it cost-effective for us to "perfect" our courses. We simply are "good enough," for the networks that hire us do not reward "perfect."

In biology, the match between an organism and resources in its environment does not have to be "perfect" to benefit the organism. It only needs to be "good enough" to sustain the organism. Biologists call this "good-enough" match "functionality." My example of online teaching is an example of "functionality." Because of network/supply chain dynamics, online teaching is "good enough."

"Functionality," incidentally, reminds me of a classic marketing guide/study for consultants titled Selling the Invisible. Consultants, who play the role of experts, only need to be "good enough," not "perfect." Most clients have no idea of how "perfect" looks. Consultants, to use the language of biology, only need to offer "functionality," not "perfection," to get paid.

A former student of mine who teaches online recently complained to me that his online employer did not value his hard work. I told him that he and I come from the old school of "perfection." Today, because of networks/supply chains, the trend is away from rewarding "perfection." This is hard medicine for some of us to swallow, because we take personal satisfaction in doing a "perfect" job.

However, the logic of "functionality," the result of Internet technology that more and more orchestrates how we live and work, is now "in the saddle," responding to and driving events. I suspect it will result in ever-lower standards. "Functionality" will undermine the hoopla over quality services and products in the 1990s. I do not want to accept this trend, but my experiences with vendors of online services remind me again and again that "good enough" beats "perfect" today.

We now live more and more in a climate of "functionality." The Internet-driven environment around us favors it. As the late Peter F. Drucker pointed out, "climate," the overall environmental trend, differs from "weather," the day-to day-variations in this trend. Some of us will continue to practice "perfection" on a day-to-day-basis, but the trend toward a climate of "functionality" is against us. Adapt or perish as Darwin's "survival of the fittest" maxim argues.

My Ph.D. advisor (Professor/Dean Donald J. McCarty, University of Wisconsin - Madison) taught me, "Paul, the environment is is all-powerful." "Good enough" beats "perfection."