Table of contents
- Rube Goldberg: an engineer who mocked overcomplication
- The math of a fragile chain
- From satire to organizational over-engineering
- What these machines teach us about agility
- How to avoid the “Rube Goldberg” effect in your organization
- In conclusion: simplifying is an art
- Simplify with FluidOps
- Frequently asked questions
Rube Goldberg: an engineer who mocked overcomplication
In 1931, the American cartoonist Rube Goldberg published Professor Butts's “self-operating napkin”: raising a spoon pulls a string, a cracker is sent toward a bird, a perch tilts, seeds fall, a lighter ignites, a rocket takes off… until a pendulum finally wipes the diner's mouth. A long chain of steps for a one-second gesture.
Reuben Lucius Goldberg (1883-1970) studied engineering at the University of California, Berkeley before becoming a newspaper cartoonist, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for a political cartoon. His name made it into the dictionary: a “Rube Goldberg” device accomplishes a simple task through needlessly complicated means.
Today, creators such as Joseph Herscher (the Joseph's Machines channel) have turned it into a genre of its own on the web. It is fascinating to watch. It is less fun to recognize the same pattern in your own organization: a simple request that crosses ten steps before it is done.
The math of a fragile chain
In a Rube Goldberg machine, every step has to work for the next one to trigger. In reliability engineering this is a “series system”: the probability that the whole thing works is the product of the success probabilities of each element, provided the steps are independent (UT Austin, n.d.).
The arithmetic is unforgiving, even with very reliable steps:
| Chained steps | Reliability of each step: 95% | Reliability of each step: 99% |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | 86% | 97% |
| 10 | 60% | 90% |
| 20 | 36% | 82% |
| 50 | 8% | 61% |
At 99% reliability per step, a ten-step chain succeeds nine times out of ten, and a fifty-step chain barely six times out of ten. In a project, a “step” is a handoff, an approval, a re-entry of data, a switch of tool. Three mechanisms make it worse:
- Information loss. The more people involved, the more communication channels there are: their number grows as n(n-1)/2, that is 10 channels for 5 people, 45 for 10 and 190 for 20 (Brooks, 1975). Each channel is a chance to distort the message.
- The tolerance effect. Just as one crooked domino brings down the whole chain, a poorly defined deliverable is paid for in cascade: every following step inherits the error and passes it on to the schedule.
- Tool sprawl. Switching between tasks, apps or message threads leaves part of your attention stuck on what you just left, which Sophie Leroy calls “attention residue” (Leroy, 2009). An outdated spreadsheet, three messaging apps and lost emails make for an extremely fragile system.
From satire to organizational over-engineering
Goldberg was parodying his era's enthusiasm for machines: humans, he believed, have a natural tendency to invent overly complicated solutions to simple problems. That tendency is alive and well in companies.
Take an ordinary request: approving a visual. It ends up requiring four meetings, twelve emails, three rounds of back-and-forth and sign-off from five departments. No single step is absurd on its own: one reassures, another checks, a third informs. It is their sum that is absurd.
Why isn't it simply removed? A series of experiments published in Nature shows that we tend to look for solutions by adding elements, and overlook simply taking some away (Adams et al., 2021). Adding is a reflex; removing takes a decision, and therefore an accepted risk.
Lean management has a name for this: “over-processing”, doing more than the customer expects, to which are added the waits between steps (Ohno, 1988; Womack & Jones, 1996).
What these machines teach us about agility
The engineers who build these machines have to tame chaos, and their methods overlap with those of good project management:
| In the Rube Goldberg machine | In project management |
|---|---|
| Think from end to start: begin with the final effect, then work back up the chain. | Define the final deliverable (objectives and key results) before breaking down tasks (Covey, 1989; Doerr, 2018). |
| Test module by module: each section is tuned before being connected. | Validate continuously, with short sprints and milestones, rather than at final delivery (Schwaber & Sutherland, 2020). |
| Remove superfluous steps: every part removed is one less breakdown. | Spot and eliminate bottlenecks and waste (Lean). |
| Start from what works: add a step to a chain that already runs. | A complex system that works always evolved from a simple system that worked (Gall's law, 1977). |
To test module by module, nothing beats short, well-defined tasks: see why breaking down tasks boosts productivity.
How to avoid the “Rube Goldberg” effect in your organization
Three rules are enough to keep your workflows smooth:
- Aim for operational sobriety. If a step adds no direct value to the final result, remove it or merge it with the previous one.
- Centralize your flows. Reduce the number of intermediaries and scattered tools to limit information loss and context switching.
- Automate what should be automated. Save complexity for creation and thinking, not for carrying out repetitive tasks.
To take action, a thirty-minute audit is enough:
- Pick a recurring request (approving a visual, processing an order, onboarding a customer).
- Map its real path, from request to delivery, including every handoff.
- Mark the steps that add no value for the customer or the result.
- Remove one this week, then measure lead time and errors.
- Repeat with the next step: you simplify through small subtractions, not through an overhaul.
A Kanban board helps make that path visible: you can see where requests pile up and which column is one too many.
In conclusion: simplifying is an art
Building a Rube Goldberg machine is a fascinating exercise, for fun or to understand physics. Day to day, your project management should not look like a giant game of dominoes where the slightest gust risks bringing everything down.
The right question is not “what can we add?” but “what can we remove without losing anything?”.
Simplify with FluidOps
FluidOps brings your tasks, sprints and schedules together in one place: a Kanban board to see the flow, a Gantt chart to plan, and centralized project management to limit scattered tools. Optimization tools such as the Eisenhower matrix are included in the free plan. Also see the big rocks method for choosing your priorities.
The free plan is €0 per month, the Individual plan €12 per month or €120 per year, and the Business plan starts at €12 per seat per month billed annually. Details are on the pricing page.
Frequently asked questions
What is a Rube Goldberg machine?
It is a device that accomplishes a simple task through a long chain of needlessly complicated steps. The name comes from the American cartoonist Rube Goldberg (1883-1970).
Why does a long chain of steps fail more often?
Because every step has to succeed for the next one to start: the overall success probability is the product of each step's probability. At 99% per step, ten steps succeed about 90% of the time, fifty steps about 61%.
What is organizational over-engineering?
It is adding meetings, approvals, intermediaries or tools to a process beyond what adds value to the result. Each addition seems reasonable; it is their accumulation that slows work down and makes it fragile.
How do you simplify a work process?
Map the real path of a request, spot the steps with no direct value for the result, remove one at a time and measure the effect on lead time and errors. Centralizing tools and automating repetitive tasks further reduces the risk of information loss.
Sources
- Adams, G. S., Converse, B. A., Hales, A. H., & Klotz, L. E. (2021). People systematically overlook subtractive changes. Nature, 592, 258-261. doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03380-y
- Brooks, F. P. (1975). The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering. Addison-Wesley.
- Covey, S. R. (1989). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Free Press.
- Doerr, J. (2018). Measure What Matters. Portfolio/Penguin.
- Gall, J. (1977). Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail. Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co.
- Joseph's Machines. About. josephsmachines.com/about
- Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168-181. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.04.002
- Merriam-Webster. Rube Goldberg. merriam-webster.com
- Ohno, T. (1988). Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production. Productivity Press.
- Schwaber, K., & Sutherland, J. (2020). The Scrum Guide. scrumguides.org
- UT Austin. Reliability (ORMM supplement, series systems). utexas.edu
- Wikipedia. Rube Goldberg. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg
- Womack, J. P., & Jones, D. T. (1996). Lean Thinking. Simon & Schuster.