Efficiency vs. uniqueness: the false dilemma of operations

We believed that by making businesses more efficient, we would make them stronger, but we ended up making them indistinguishable. The same tools, the same processes, the same platforms, the same indicators.

Organizations that are perfectly designed but which, along the way, have lost sight of what made them different, a way of doing things, of talking about them, of believing in them, which cannot be written down in specifications but can be felt in interactions, in the tone of a conversation, sometimes in a decision.

By rationalizing everything, we have confused reliability with consistency and efficiency with identity.

We have been so keen to control the way things work that we have stopped asking ourselves why they work that way, and this is perhaps the great misunderstanding of our time in terms of both customer relations and employee experience: thinking that a business’s performance can be measured solely by the perfection of its mechanisms, when in fact it is determined by the consistency between its behavior and what it claims to be.

There is a point where operational excellence ceases to be a strength and becomes a form of betrayal of the promise made to customers and employees, of a brand’s DNA.

The moment when the tool, designed to support the promise, ends up redefining it, and when the system erases personality under the pretext of rigor.

This is a major challenge for businesses where systems have already largely taken over from intentions and at the dawn of massive automation supported by AI: choosing between reassuring efficiency and a unifying identity. Or finding the right mix.

In short:

• The quest for efficiency has standardized businesses to the point of making them indistinguishable, erasing their unique identities in favor of uniform systems, tools, and processes.
• Technical performance has often taken precedence over brand promise, leading to a loss of consistency between what the business claims to be and what it delivers to its customers and employees.
• A business’s identity does not lie in its slogans but in its concrete decisions; it manifests itself in the way it responds, interacts, and prioritizes, particularly when it comes to technological tools.
• The Klarna case illustrates how extensive automation, without an identity framework, can break a brand’s relational promise and lead to a breakdown of trust with customers.
• The challenge is not to reject technology, but to frame it with a clear intention, so that the choice of tools, structures, and experiences is consistent with the business’s core identity.

When efficiency erases identity

In their quest for efficiency, businesses have ceased to be distinctive and therefore differentiable. We praise them for their rigor, their mastery, their fluidity, but we no longer really know why we choose them, or even what they stand for. Everyone does well, everyone does the same thing, everyone aligns with the same standards, the same platforms, the same “best practices”. In the obsessive pursuit of efficiency, we standardized what needed to be standardized, then what could be standardized, and finally what should not be standardized: the way of doing things, the way of being. In other words, identity.

For years, operational logic has taken precedence over cultural logic. Systems have replaced trade-offs, processes have dictated posture, and the brand promise, which should be the guiding principle of the business, has gradually dissolved into the tools that are supposed to serve it. We rationalized the mechanics, but we lost the music, and in many organizations today, all that remains is a system that runs well, even very well, but without soul.

When tools end up making decisions for businesses

This is not to question the need for standardization or the relevance of automating certain tasks, which is sometimes even essential for controlling quality, ensuring reliable execution, and reducing uncertainty. But it becomes problematic when it ceases to be a support and becomes an identity norm. A business that lets its information system decide how it works, how it communicates, and how it responds to its customers or employees ends up delegating its personality to software designed for everyone. And when everyone uses the same tools, configured by the same consultants according to the same “best practices,” it is no longer the business that we recognize but the software it uses (How management let systems do the thinking for them).

This is where a more serious confusion arises: believing that you can differentiate yourself by using the same models as your competitors, on the grounds that they are supposedly effective. The truth is that you can be both efficient and interchangeable, and that this is probably the worst of all balances: that of an organization that no longer makes mistakes but no longer makes a difference.

Identity is not a statement, it is a system of arbitration

Identity has too often been reduced to institutional discourse, a “raison d’être” or a slogan, but in reality, identity is a system of arbitration. It is what makes a business choose, between two valid options, the one that resembles it, the one that expresses its promise, the one that confirms what it says it is. It is also what guides decisions when the context is unclear, exceptions to the rules, and posture in relationships. And this is precisely what disappears when tools become the compass for operations, especially when some people think they can completely replace humans with machines, starting with customer service.

Two businesses can deploy the same CRM, the same chatbot, the same customer relationship model, and produce two radically different experiences. The difference does not come from technology or processes, but from the prior design of the business and its operations, the latitude given to humans, and the way they are inhabited. One defined what it wanted to convey through these devices and the human/technology mix, while the other simply implemented them. The first chose technology that served its identity, while the second denied its identity in favor of technology.

And, ultimately, the decision isn’t always that complicated. I was talking the other day with the founder of a successful B2B scale-up who was wondering about the place of AI, and therefore humans, in his customer service. Not knowing the exact context, my answer could only be generic, but I asked him one question: “What do you think sets you apart from your competitors, who will always have more resources than you to develop their product, and when one of your customers meets a colleague, what do you want them to say about you and why would they say it?” I think that, in an instant, the idea of “everything AI” left his mind.

EDGY: understanding what the business is before looking at how it works

This is the whole point of the EDGY language I mentioned earlier, which shows that the business is a living system where three dimensions must remain aligned: identity, experience, and architecture (EDGY: a common language to align identity, experience, and operations). But the real complexity does not lie in these isolated blocks: it lies at their intersections, where intentions become practices and principles translate into structures.

Between identity and experience, we impact the brand, i.e., the promise that is lived out, the one that materializes in every interaction.

Between identity and architecture, we impact the organization, i.e., the way in which this promise is made possible or prevented by structures, tools, and rules.

In other words, the brand conveys what the business says it is, and the organization conveys what it really is. The former makes people believe, the latter provides proof. When the two are aligned, everything else works almost naturally, but when they are not, everything else becomes cosmetic.

What is acceptable for one will not always be acceptable for another

This is where standardization, often caused by technology and process uniformity, does the most damage, because it negates the fact that each business, faced with the same problem, should come up with its own solution. Two organizations facing the same constraint, whether it be a productivity, service quality, or experience issue, should not find the same solution, because their identity, promise, and culture do not allow them to approach the role of technology or the place of humans in the same way. Where one will use technology as a lever for autonomy and discernment, the other will use it as an instrument of control and standardization. It is not the nature of the problem that makes the difference, but the way in which the business chooses to respond to it, and that response should always be an extension of who it is. A business that promises simplicity cannot add complexity just to be like everyone else.

A brand that promises trust cannot impose a logic of constant control and a total loss of autonomy on its employees, just as an organization that promises proximity cannot entrust its customer relations to generic AI.

The problem is not the tool, but the lack of discernment in its implementation and the fact that we no longer ask ourselves whether the way we do things is still consistent with the way we are.

Klarna: when efficiency breaks the promise

The case of Klarna perfectly illustrates how a purely operational decision can, without even being anticipated, undermine the consistency of a business. The massive automation of customer relations via an AI chatbot, rolled out in 2024, was presented as a demonstration of efficiency: millions of interactions handled, lower costs, almost instantaneous response times—in short, the promise of a high-performing business in its most accomplished form. But behind these figures, the reality was less exciting: the tone changed, exchanges became standardized, distance crept in where the brand wanted to be close, simple, fluid, almost complicit, and what made the connection so special disappeared in the execution of the model (When AI turns your secret sauce into ketchup).

The result: declining satisfaction, customer churn, and massive rehiring, with a tweet from the CEO that will go down in the annals of customer relations:

“We’ve had a revelation: in a world of AI, nothing will ever be as valuable as humans. You can laugh at us for realizing this so late, but we’re going to start working to make Klarna the best at offering humans to talk to.”

This was not a technical accident, nor even a strategic error, but a denial of identity. It wasn’t technology that betrayed the promise, but the failure to define what it had the right to transform and what it didn’t. By letting the machine interpret the relationship in a highly organized, structured way, but without an identity framework, Klarna allowed the logic of efficiency to redefine its way of being, as if performance alone could take the place of identity. This is the difference between a business that masters its tools and a business that allows itself to be shaped by them.

“Customer experience is the new marketing”: but it still has to be right

When Steve Cannon, then CEO of Mercedes-Benz USA, said that “Customer experience is the new marketing,” he wasn’t just talking for the sake of it, but observing that what a business does for its customers carries more weight than what it tells them. Experience is not window dressing, it is a language, and every interaction and every response says something about the brand. In an environment where tools, scripts, and processes are all similar, it is no longer the system that makes the difference, but the way it is inhabited and embodied.

You can have the best CRM on the market, the most fluid chatbot, the most detailed data: if the tone of the responses, the choices of prioritization, the way of compensating for an error or dealing with a doubt no longer bear the brand, then the brand disappears. It’s a question of consistency, and a customer experience without uniqueness is a promise without embodiment. And when the promise is no longer recognized in the experience, the whole system rings false, even if it remains effective.

The employee experience: what happens inside always ends up being visible outside

You can’t build a distinctive customer experience on an organizational model that produces the opposite experience internally. What you offer your employees always ends up being seen externally, because the employee experience is not a separate component but is the exact mirror of the promise made to customers. If employees cannot express the principles that the business displays externally in their daily lives, then the brand cracks from within. And sooner or later, this crack becomes visible in everyday interactions, attitudes, and decisions.

You don’t talk about a culture, you live it or you suffer it (Your employee experience is your employer brand).

A business that talks about trust but promotes a culture of control among its managers, that values responsibility while imposing stifling procedures, or that celebrates proximity while organizing remote work as a form of distancing, always ends up creating a dissonance that erodes cohesion, then credibility, and ultimately the very identity of the collective. This is not an employer brand issue, it is a systemic alignment issue.

Regaining control over intention

This is the whole point of business design: it is not about designing a prettier or more modern organization, but about reconnecting intention, promise, and approach, even before choosing the tools that will carry them forward (Regaining control over corporate design: intention before tools). Too many businesses have reversed this order: they start with technology and then wonder how to adapt their model, practices, and culture to it. In other words, they let their information system shape the real version of their business, while continuing to defend a theoretical version in their discourse.

Taking back control does not mean rejecting technology, but refusing to let it become the moral benchmark for the organization. It does not mean slowing down the transformation, but redirecting it, which requires collectively asking the right questions: what do we want to preserve, what are we willing to standardize, and how far can we automate without erasing what defines us? Ultimately, technology does not define who we are, but shows what we have stopped deciding.

Bottom Line

Modern businesses have learned to measure everything except what sets them apart from others. They know how to count time, costs, flows, and conversions, but they no longer always know how to name what they stand for.

By constantly adjusting every action to the logic of their systems, they have ended up dissolving into them.

It is not technology that distorts businesses, it is their refusal to decide what they want to do with it, just as it is not automation that erases uniqueness, but the lack of intention behind its use.

The challenge, therefore, is not to slow down, but to choose: choose what to standardize and what to preserve, choose where humans add meaning, choose when the promise should take precedence over the process.

To answer your questions…

Image credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)

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