Effectiveness.

Welcome to the Friday Loose Bloggers Consortium where twelve of us write on the same topic. Today’s topic has been chosen by me. The ten other bloggers who write regularly are, in alphabetical order, Delirious, gaelikaa, Grannymar, Magpie, Maria SF, ocdwriter, Padmum, Paul, Rohit, The Old Fossil and Will. Do drop in on their blogs and see what their take is on this week’s topic. Since some of them may post late, do give some allowance for that too!

Effectiveness is defined by The Business Dictionary, as “the degree to which objectives are achieved and the extent to which targeted problems are solved. In contrast to efficiency, effectiveness is determined without reference to costs and, whereas efficiency means “doing the thing right,” effectiveness means “doing the right thing.”

The reason I chose this topic was the strong suspicion that I was being very efficient in my care giving activities but not effective. This kept bugging me and I decided to bare my soul to an amateur psychologist friend, to find out why this was happening.

On analysis it turned out that to be effective in any situation there must be feed back. In other normal activities, the feed back is an ongoing process and one can modify one’s actions to ensure that the outcome is what is desired. In this instance, the lacuna was the absence of any kind of feed back. Positive or negative.

We probed further and came to this epiphany as it were.

There can always be effectiveness or efficiency in relationships but never good or bad relationships.

We concluded that there is either a relationship or there is none. There cannot be a good one or a bad one. People in the so called bad relationships, having opted to continue that, for whatever reason, are simply in an ineffective relationship though all actions within that relationship can be efficient.

AND we decided that such a relationship should be called a Mechanical Relationship.

At this point, I raised the objection that there could be situations where the lack of feedback could be due to an inability due to illness in the care receiver, to provide such feed back. My friend readily accepted this is a valid objection and suggested that we call such a relationship as a spiritual one.

I could not agree more.

It still leaves my original problem unsolved.