Making space for Grace in Technology: Elegance > Efficiency
The Human Traffic Light
Most of us in tech are expected to maximize for efficiency all the time. To build efficient products. To manage our products efficiently. To work like the technology we spend our days designing.
Tech is uniquely good at being efficient. But the things that make tech more efficient are also the things that make it less human. This is the central trade-off. And often, we maximize for efficiency not just because it’s efficient, but because it’s easy. It’s easier to live every day without considering what’s our broader purpose. It’s easier to follow routine without questioning the why behind it. There is often not enough time for people to step back and make sense of all that they consume. Or to slow down to embrace the human moment.
I was thinking about all this recently when I read an article about the return of the traffic officers to the Piazza Venezia in Rome. I remember vividly, from my time living in Italy, passing through this central hub, whose thoroughfares get tangled up like a plate of pasta. The piazza could absolutely benefit from getting cars through it more efficiently. And yet where you’d expect a modern stoplight there stands a traffic officer on a pedestal theatrically directing motorists through the square.
Why has this traffic officer always resonated with me so much? Maybe it’s because of their beautiful white gloves. Or maybe it’s because I too feel like I spend most of my days at Google directing traffic — managing teams and projects and products and hundreds of relationships within the organization. It’s especially the way I try to do that directing of traffic — the how — that reminds me of the officers in Rome: pushing in my small way to bring more humanity into situations that would, if left to their own, rather be more efficient. In tech, there’s always an impulse to solve problems faster and with less friction. And in those situations, I am the person pushing for a little less efficiency and a little more humanity in the technologies and amongst the technologists.
At the onset of the pandemic, the traffic officers at the Piazza Venezia practically vanished overnight. Just: Poof! Gone. And gone too was the unique impact they had each day on the lives of the motorists they encountered. While reading about the officers, I was thinking about all the comparable things we lost in our lives this past year when we too vanished from our places of work overnight. It got harder than ever to maintain certain essential human qualities in our work while working remotely. Opportunities for humanity in our work were sidelined for efficiency. The easiest thing to do was just to get through one’s day in 30-minute increments of endless 30-minute video calls. The pandemic re-oriented our work days and placed new demands on our attention. And while many of us have managed to maintain efficiency, it’s come with a cost.
When I saw the triumphant return of my favorite traffic officers, it got me thinking: What can we start to imagine recovering as we slowly return to a more human version of our work? What are lessons to learn from an example like the officers of the Piazza Venezia — and our year apart from one another, when casual moments of humanity were harder to come by?
I started wondering what it is about the traffic officer that makes them so different — and such a critical anomaly — from another traffic light, another piece of technology helping us get through our day without a hiccup. And I decided it’s the grace, the craft, the elegance, and the levity. All qualities that make the process of getting those cars around the piazza slightly less efficient, but significantly more human. And all qualities we might strive to inject back into our products, our teams, and our interactions, as we too begin to return to one another this year.
Grace: Seeking Out The Human Movement
My favorite moments watching the officers in the Piazza Venezia are not the gestures that are related to the job — you go this way; you go that way; stop; go — though those are nice, too. (One of the officers likens their work to “conducting an orchestra.”) No, my favorite moments are those less essential to directing traffic that occur when a car passes by the officer’s pedestal. The little wave. The salute. The wink and the nod. The thank you and the thumbs up. The parts when we see one another as people and acknowledge our existences.
In La Repubblica, Cristina Corbucci, the first female traffic officer in the piazza, described this sort of moment on her first day on the job recently: “On the Piazza Venezia, the cars almost touch you. And you listen to the comments of the people in the cars. They compliment you. They say, Grazie! At least the women do…”
Corbucci and her colleagues are not a perfectly efficient solution to the problem of traffic. But what is gained by injecting some humanity into the middle of a busy piazza — and the commute of thousands of Romans each day — is immeasurable. (“He’s bellissimo! It’s marvelous!” a motorist responded within earshot of The New York Times, the day of one officer’s return.)
Encountering humanity in unlikely places — like in, say, the middle of a stressful traffic-filled trip across the city — is unexpected, memorable, and, I would argue, a reminder of who we are and what we’re all doing here. At Google, this can take the form of running from one side of the campus to the other for a meeting. You bump into someone else on the way to that meeting and you comment on their new haircut. It makes them smile. You start talking about ’80s hairstyles and your pace automatically slows down. You’re both late to your meeting about operational budget cuts, but you walk into the silent room laughing and bring a different energy into the space. Suddenly, this tedious topic has a warm glow around it. Just like the traffic officer, I try to get the job done a little less efficiently than a piece of technology — but with considerably more humanity. And that’s a trade-off that people, in my experience, are almost always willing to make.
Craft: Trading Efficiency for the Human Touch
During my time in Italy, this trade-off of the human touch over technological efficiency was not limited to the Piazza Venezia. It is, after all, a country renowned for (inefficiently) handcrafting everything from its dresses, suits, and shoes, to its pastas. When I lived in Milan, my barber refused to use buzzers because he thought that only scissors could achieve the nuance of his vision. He knew the haircut would take longer and would be, consequently, more expensive. But the result was far superior. This sort of commitment to excellence gives me a sense of awe. It was in no way the most efficient way to cut my hair, but I told everyone I bumped into about the best haircut I ever got. My barber’s haircuts are renowned. And his patrons are loyal to him for life. He’s made an explicit trade-off: Dropping efficiency is a gain in craft and perfection. What is less technically efficient in the short term yields long-term reputational gains and long-term business.
Rarely do we remember anything we truly love because of how fast it happened. It’s the things that are often deliberately designed or executed with less efficiency that have greater impact and are more memorable. We see this with food, with fashion, with art. It may be a winding, frustrating, inefficient path that leads a chef to the perfect dish or a director to the film she’s meant to make, but that human journey is often what makes that human product, in the end, relatable to and revered by other people. We humans know the difference between the store-bought tortilla and the handcrafted tortilla. Between the run-of-the-mill stoplight and the traffic officer who’s dead serious about her craft. Between the music streaming service that requires me to know the name of the song I want to hear and the Google Assistant that can find me the song I want even when I can’t remember what it’s called. Technology may be indifferent to those differences, but humans live for them.
Elegance: Treating Yourself Like A Human
In a perfectly efficient world, our butts would be in the same chair all day long. That’s hyper-efficient. But in most of our work lives before last March, we had daily periods of transition: taking a shower in the morning, commuting to the office, riding the elevator to another floor for a meeting.
Those periods of transition are inefficient. But it’s their very inefficiency that makes them invaluable. For me, no transition is as important to signify to my brain the difference between Not-Work and Work as changing from casual clothes into a suit each morning. This is another thing I love about the presence of the traffic officer. That uniform. Spotless. Smart. A shock to the system to those who encounter it. That uniform signifies: duty and authority. But also: dignity and elegance. It says this person respects themselves and commands respect.
For the past year, absent the transition of getting dressed for work, we have collapsed the fences between Work and Not-Work even more than usual. And not everyone among us has fought off the sweatpants-ification. So how do we recover some human elegance in our work lives when it comes to getting dressed? How do we maintain our sense of style, our sense of self, when everything is so unstructured and all we really want to do is wear athleisure all day?
I have tried to wear a suit most days this year. I did it because I wanted to look good. But also because it felt helpful to maintain a little elegance. It is not more efficient for me to take time to get dressed in a suit only to sit at my desk for most of the day video conferencing. In fact, it is harder. It is more time-consuming. But it makes me feel better and more human.
Elegance is a much deeper aspiration than efficiency. It’s not about being flashy — but rather about curiosity and empathy (for oneself and for others). About providing a pleasingly ingenious simple solution to a problem or answer to a question. Often we forget this deeper aspiration, and strive for efficiency without asking why:
I have to do this fast.
Why?
So I don’t waste time.
Why?
So I can spend time on other things that matter more to me.
Why?
Because I don’t find the everyday things I have to do particularly meaningful.
Why?
Because I’m doing them too fast to recognize the meaning in them
It’s easy to go fast. It’s easy to opt for efficiency. But when you slow down a little and do the slightly harder and more human thing, you create an opportunity to find meaning in the details of your everyday endeavors.
Dressing up is one of those everyday endeavors. It establishes the mood of work, the mind of work. Differentiating between Work and Not-Work in how you dress is a first actionable step toward recovering elegance. It matters — in life, and at work, too, where it’s not just important that you get something done, but how you get it done. That’s been the case everywhere I’ve lived in the world, too, in all situations in both Work and Not-Work. What makes us human is how we complete the job, how we paint outside the lines, the impression that we leave, the humanity we bring to work.
Levity: Making Time To Laugh — Even When Time is Tight
Time is a finite resource. And as with the number in my bank account at any given moment, I only have so much to keep for myself or to spend on others. As a result, I am selfish with my time. I protect it carefully. But I also make sure that when you and I are sharing time — in a meeting, in a video chat — I am getting the most out of that shared time. It’s why I’m light. It’s why I joke around. It’s why I’ll interrupt a discussion to point out the cat crawling on your head. I admire that quality about the traffic officers, as well — the way they make time for lightness. The willingness to mug for tourists, to gesture charismatically, and to embrace the impression that they are indeed musical conductors performing for a packed theater.
An efficient meeting can transpire without a single human moment of conversation or small talk or serendipity. It can be soulless. But if you’re sharing my time, I need to enjoy myself. I push our tech to be more human, and if you’re acting too much like the tech, I’ll push you to be more human with me, too. Some people might think I’m just making bullshit jokes all the time. But those things are useful and necessary to connect. It’s strategic. I’m going to use this knowledge for better conversations later, for a more fluid relationship with you in the long-term.
There are plenty of situations when there’s no time for joking around, and bringing levity to a meeting or a conversation will backfire. Joking around might stress you out even more. What’s essential is to know when to do it and when not to do it. The traffic officer works because traffic officers aren’t everywhere, clowning around all over the city, bringing traffic to a standstill. What you’re looking for are those moments — in meetings, or in any system — when levity can be introduced, to cut against the typical, to bring soul. It’s the balance that’s important of what am I asking and what am I giving. It’s figuring out when things need to be chop-chop and when they can slow down to let some laughter in. When it’s beneficial for laughter to cut against the efficiency of all those soulless encounters elsewhere. Just like there’s an opportunity to introduce a charismatic woman or man into the busiest square in Rome because of the system of efficient streets around it.
A Little Humanity Goes A Long Way In An Efficient World
It makes sense that so many technologists think that the best way to solve all problems is with more tech. If all you have is a hammer, all you’ll see are nails. We might be technologists, but we shouldn’t act like technology. Or more to the point: We are humans, so let’s embrace our humanity. I strive to remember this all day long. And while I welcome efficiency to get the job done at a high level, I always make space for grace and craft and elegance and levity — because these are the things that matter to me the most. There is always an opportunity to push for humanity, human-ness, in our products and our workplaces, in our teams and interactions with colleagues. Even — and especially — if that makes them slightly less efficient.
