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Efficiency vs Resilience

Tom Geraghty · Ecological Thinking, Complexity & Systems, Organisational Design

Uses the Irish Potato Famine and Nokia as cases to examine the tension between efficiency (standardisation, monoculture) and resilience (diversity, redundancy). Draws on Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety to argue that what optimises in stable conditions fails under disruption.

Connected concepts (14)

• Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (paper)
• Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems (paper)
• Risk Management in a Dynamic Society: A Modelling Problem (paper)
• Working in Practice But Not in Theory: Theoretical Challenges of "High-Reliability Organizations" (paper)
• Ecosystems and the Biosphere as Complex Adaptive Systems (paper)
• Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social-Ecological Systems (paper)
• Resilience: The Emergence of a Perspective for Social–Ecological Systems Analyses (paper)
• Complexity
• Rewetting Organisations
• Adaptive Cycle
• Resilience Engineering
• Selection Pressure & PS
• Queueing Theory & Slack
• Theory of Constraints