If you are dealing with machinery, there comes a point where the cost of more efficiency or productivity can become too exorbitant to justify improvement. But is this true in the same way for tweaking social systems?

Making a car go 10% faster, or making it 10% more efficient on gas or battery life can prove to be too expensive to be worthwhile. It can be a simple cost/benefit equation. But what about improving teamwork or relationships?

What’s the price of a team not working well, but not trying to make it better? What’s the price of poor communication continuing without working to improve communication channels and clarity? What’s the price of maintaining unfairness, inequality, or injustice?

When does the cost of positive social change become inefficient?

If you ask me, unlike the simple math when dealing with machinery, we can’t do the math in improving social change until we’ve done more to make things right. The costs we can’t tolerate here sit on the extremes. They are the costs of ignorance, hate, and blame. They are also the costs of retaliation, shaming, and sweeping generalizations.

What is the cost of social change for good? My simple math tells me the effort is worth the price we need to pay. Because the value we get always exceeds the price we pay, when we are striving to make the world a better place.