Efficiency — Resilience balance
When you see the buzzword "efficient," do you pause to think if it's necessarily better? Or, by default, is it "more efficient = better"?
The idea of saving money, effort, and resources seems appealing.
How do we increase efficiency?
We make a process more efficient by eliminating redundancy. An example would be– streamlining operations at the workplace such that no two people do the same thing.
But this could reduce the resilience of a system. A system could mean — a company, team, daily routine, lifestyle, gadgets.
In the workplace context, if someone's on leave for an extended period, it could stunt the work of others in the team.
What is resilience?
It's a system's ability to bounce back from a shock. If your hard disk crashes, and you have a backup of the data on the cloud, your storage system is resilient. It's only going to take you some time to create another backup. You aren't stunted by the shock because you focus on resilience over efficiency.
It might've been more cost-effective to have just one copy of your data, but that would've made your storage situation vulnerable. Increasing redundancy prepares you for a crisis.
Sometimes, it takes a crisis like COVID-19 to assess how vulnerable our systems are. We realized how crippled we are within our households without help for food, domestic service, repair.
Even in our personal life, resilience plays an important role. If you depend solely on one person instead of a group of friends, you make your social life extremely vulnerable. With the slightest absence of that person, you're going to feel inadequate.
How to shift the focus towards resilience?
Amongst the plenty of ways to increase resilience, a simple, relatable step is —diversification. You might already be
Diversifying your investments
Maintaining backups for storage
Similarly, analyze every aspect of your life for vulnerabilities. Is any part of it dependent on a single person or a single object? Are you hinging on something, if broken, that will turn your life upside down?
Wise man, Dumbledore diversified his confidants. No one person knew all of his secrets, which made his schemes more resilient and impenetrable.
"I prefer not to put all of my secrets in one basket, particularly not a basket that spends so much time dangling on the arm of Lord Voldemort." - Albus Dumbledore.
Does resilience have downsides?
Resilience is not unambiguously good either. It enables a system to bounce back to its vitality and original form. But in some cases, when systems become obsolete, a regime shift is much needed.
If you have old videos on a VCR cassette, better to shift your data to a hard disk instead of buying a VCR converter cable.
The post-pandemic world has normalized hybrid working and direct releases onto OTTs. These were all impending regime shifts but could finally happen when the systems' resilience broke.
What good is a resilient sexist society, a resilient toxic relationship, a resilient oppressive household? An extremely resilient system is unfavorable to any change. A system should be sufficiently resilient but not inflexible to a point where it is incapable of change.
Like extreme efficiency, extreme resilience is undesirable. It obstructs transformation.
The delicate balance between efficiency and resilience is popularly known as the stability-sensitivity dilemma.
As one of my professors told,
"Treat any system like a relationship. It should be stable enough to be unperturbed by the small fights and sensitive enough to sense if it is toxic and break free from it."