Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2010-06-25 07:50:23 - Graham Ellis
The first young lady asked for a pint of Black Rat (the local Melksham cider), and the barman asked her for proof of age. But the second young lady, who asked the for a pint of coke, was served without question.
Typical lazy barman? No - typical efficient barman!
With joined up thinking, so much can be achieved. Cutting out the unnecessary steps, avoiding duplication of effort where the results won't change in any case, and combining duties / tasks / roles / appointments so that a whole series of goals can be achieve in one step ... and thinking through what you are doing, and why you are doing it in the wider context, can make so much difference.
I'm writing this in the week that we've had a budget where government spending is to be slashed. And that's going to effect all of us, and in different ways. How much are those cuts going to hurt? Or how much could they be made by a realistic saving of resources by employing some of the joined up thinking that I'm talking about above?
Let me show you a couple of examples - both from my daughter in law's blog: [example one] and [example two]. These will open in a new tab or window .. have a look at them before you read on, please.
I content that the National Health Service could have saved a significant proportion of their costs, as well as reducing the most enormous stress on Delene and Chris (not to mention the cost to them) with a bit of wider, joined up logic. I content that the housing people, by liaising a bit more and thinking things through could have come up with something that was far better - and wouldn't be leaving the need for more expenditure by other people (including state organisations). In fact, I would go so far as to contend that between them, these two groups could have provided something that's significantly more useful, at a significant financial, stress and disruption saving.
So what will the effect of those government cuts be? If they can get things right along the lines I'm suggesting above, then the effect might be much more positive than many fear. The more thoughtful use of resources, rather than the reduction of final results. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert at planning and government - so I'm not in a position to say that this is how it should be done ... but I can see with the evidence of my own eyes that there are so many areas where less can give more.
The "barman" example comes from the way I teach the Perl Programming course. In Perl, the and operator combines two logical results - but it's lazy. In other words, Perl evaluates the first result but only goes on to evaluate the second result if the first is true. After all, if the first is false, the whole thing combined is bound to be false anyway, so what would be the point of evaluating the second?