effectiveness is overrated

I was thinking today about how doing the right things is overrated. I was thinking it's more important to do anything than to make sure it's the right thing to be doing at that moment. Often, when we try to determine the right thing to be doing at that moment, that moment simply passes us by. When we choose to do something at that moment, we, at the very least, can learn something--something we can apply when making the decision of what to do in the next moment.

"Doing the right things" is often used as the definition of effectiveness. That might be somewhat true--the actual definition is "the degree to which something is successful in producing the desired result; success." But I think that effectiveness as a quality or metric for work needs to be downplayed. 

Sometimes things that at first appear to be ineffective and/or inefficient result in unexpected and delightful, impactful outcomes. Having an intuition for when this might be the case is part of what people mean when they say something is "an art". 

If you see your business as one that relies on creative output, as many knowledge-work-based businesses do, it might be just as important to allow for inefficiencies as it is to make things more efficient. It might be just as important to allow things you think will be ineffective to happen, for those unexpected outcomes to occur.