[lmkg]

Operational efficiency analysis originally came from optimizing military operations in WWII, and it cut its teeth in industrial production in the following decades. The history shows. As a discipline, it's still focused on lowering the amount of time, labor, and money to achieve well-defined objectives (and to be fair, it's very good at it).

The field is still somewhat lost in optimizing creative work, like coding. I definitely agree that cognitive load is the operative bottleneck in a large swathe of non-industrial work. I think that operational efficiency research probably could be used to good effect there if it were applied correctly, but the problems are still poorly understood by the experts, so it's a while off.

[zb]

Well, the time and motion stuff he's talking about actually go back further, to Frederick W. Taylor in the late 19th Century. Robert Kanigel's biography of Taylor The One Best Way gives a very good history and a much more in-depth analysis than can be compressed into a blog post.