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.

Neighbours (22)

• An Introduction to Cybernetics (paper)
• 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)
• Early-warning signals for critical transitions (paper)
• Ecosystems and the Biosphere as Complex Adaptive Systems (paper)
• Looking At Things Properly
• Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems (paper)
• Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social-Ecological Systems (paper)
• Resilience: The Emergence of a Perspective for Social–Ecological Systems Analyses (paper)
• Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (paper)
• Threat Rigidity Effects in Organizational Behavior: A Multilevel Analysis (paper)
• Brain of the Firm (paper)
• Complexity
• Crisis-Ready Teams
• Rewetting Organisations
• Adaptive Cycle
• Resilience Engineering
• Selection Pressure & PS
• Queueing Theory & Slack
• Theory of Constraints