id: 1161,4A1
title: Resilience is lost during optimization without a holistic view.
date: 2022-03-01

Resilience is lost during optimization without a holistic view.

Static stability is easy to see, but resilience-enabling mechanisms are not because they sit at the boundaries of operation, which systems optimize for staying away from. “Rarely needed” being hard to distinguish from “never needed”, which can enable brittleness when these processes are removed to optimize other factors. Lost resilience tends to only become visible upon running into a scenario where it would have helped.rM3

  1. ↩

    Donella H. Meadows and Diana Wright, Thinking in Systems: A Primer (White River Junction, Vt: Chelsea Green Pub, 2008). (See notes.)