Zeno’s Paradox for the Organization
Thanks to #lockdownindia, I get to spend a lot of time with my family. Nowadays I have to narrate a story to my daughter before she sleeps. Since she knows most of the fairy tales already, I decided to improvise. I started creating a mashup of stories and movies and whatever I could think of to impress her.
One such story was about Achilles and Tortoise. When I began to spin the yarn, my son interrupted me and asked me to talk about Zeno's paradox. That would put his sister to sleep immediately and save him the misery of listening to my made-up stories. While I ignored him and continued my task, Zeno's paradox stuck in my head.
If you want to know more about Zeno's Paradox click here.
Zeno’s Paradox may be stated as follows. Suppose I wish to go to work from my home. First, of course, I must cover half the distance. Then, I must cover half the remaining distance. Then, I must cover half the remaining distance. Then I must cover half the remaining distance…and so on forever. The consequence is that I can never get to my office.
Zeno implies that motion is impossible. In the above example before I can cover half the distance I must cover half of half the distance, and before I can do that I must cover half of half of half of the distance, and so on, so that in reality I can never move any distance at all, because doing so involves moving an infinite number of small intermediate distances first.
Take an example of any organization. Every organization wants to achieve perfection in every operation that it performs. Each unit in the organization defines goals for the year and strives to achieve the goals. Yet we continue to struggle and seldom achieve what we aimed for.
Like Zeno, we break down our expected results into tasks. Unfortunately the universe likes to add more tasks to that goal (emails, meetings, conference, traffic-jams, sick-days....ad infinitum). Like Zeno we get bogged down by the infinite tasks. We think perfection is impossible.
Zeno's paradox has been proven to be wrong a long time back. However we continue to struggle with the paradox in everyday life. If I think about it, it will take me some fixed time to travel half the distance to the office, say 20 minutes. How long will it take to cross half the remaining distance? 10 minutes. Covering half of the remaining distance (one-eighth of the total) will take only 5 minutes. And once I have covered all the infinitely many sub-distances and added up all the time it took to travel? Only 40 minutes, and here I am, in the office (don't try this on JVLR in Mumbai. Zeno was right when it comes to JVLR).
Similar to the solution for Zeno's paradox, to achieve perfection, we need to ensure progress. Each task has to result in progress. Initially progress will be high. As we move ahead, progress will diminish little by little (half of the previous). But each of the small amount of progress will add up and lead to perfection. As we progress and rate of progress slows down, Zeno takes control. We start to doubt and worry about the result. That’s when we allow Zeno to win. We need to realize that Progress is Important.....Perfection is the result.
Some of you might argue that Perfection can never be achieved in an organization because business changes and the goal post moves. Did Zeno think about this too? Did he envision a paradox? I don’t know. If you come across such a Zeno paradox do let me know.