It’s kind of a big deal for us today in modern society.  We want to make things faster.  We want to do more with less.  You’ve heard the catch phrases.  In business, in education, in love, we want extreme efficiency.

I was at TEDxAFC and there was a speaker that talked about biomimicry.  In many areas of design, they are looking at nature to copy their design to make bullet trains move faster and optics to see better.  Biomimicry helps design to become more efficient, but if you look in nature, there are so many things in it that aren’t efficient.  We copy from biology to be efficient, but the design in nature aren’t efficient.  It’s extremely ornate and complex and wasteful.

Rory Sutherland says that the peacock’s tail is a deliberate form of waste and that it communicates that you have resources to spare.  We then instinctively trust organizations and people with resources to spare.  Peacocks demonstrate available resources through gratuitous waste.  He goes on to say that people are like this as well.  We find value in the ability to demonstrate gratuitous waste, yet we order our world around Extreme Efficiency.

Sometimes we just don’t make sense.