Resilience is something that may be very hard to see, unless you exceed its limits, overwhelm and damage the balancing loops, and the system structure breaks down. Because resilience may not be obvious without a whole-system view, people often sacrifice resilience for stability, or for productivity, or for some other more immediately recognizable system property.
Injections of genetically engineered bovine growth hormone increase the milk production of a cow without proportionately increasing the cow’s food intake. The hormone diverts some of the cow’s metabolic energy from other bodily functions to milk production… The cost of increased production is lowered resilience. The cow is less healthy, less long-lived, more dependent on human management.
Just-in-time deliveries of products to retailers or parts to manufacturers have reduced inventory instabilities and brought down costs in many industries. The just-in-time model also has made the production system more vulnerable, however, to perturbations in fuel supply, traffic flow, computer breakdown, labor availability, and other possible glitches.
That was from Donella H. Meadows, Thinking In Systems: A Primer. Of course, the just-in-time deliveries problem looks prescient from our post-Covid world.
The Pentagon is perhaps one of the best examples, for those familiar with it, of sacrificing resilience and self organization in the name of narrowly defined “efficiency.” The whole construct since Robert McNamara has been to select the single-best solution for each problem before development — and usually one platform to address multiple problems for “economies of scale” reasons. But that leaves DoD without multiple ways of accomplishing an outcome, and so a single effective countermeasure from the enemy could lead to a precipitous collapse in fighting capability.
Big multi-mission platforms are big because they can be upgraded to counter the enemy’s countermeasure. Unfortunately, the “efficient” development path also takes multiple years to get the upgrade fielded. The far more resilient method is to have overlapping networks of single-mission systems that compose into a variety of alternative kill chains — a “kill web.” Enemy countermeasures, changes in environment, or otherwise would only slowly degrade the overall military performance.
Once you have “winner take all” weapons platforms, the poor folks assigned to them are incentivized to keep their funding stream in tact at the expense of new experiments that might threaten their role by claiming “waste,” “duplication,” and “inefficiency.” Here’s a bit more from Meadows:
… Like resilience, self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability… Self-organization produces heterogeneity and unpredictability. It is likely to come up with whole new structures, whole new ways of doing things. It requires freedom and experimentation, and a certain amount of disorder. These conditions that encourage self-organization often can be scary for individuals and threatening to power structures.
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