Efficiency and Resiliency are good.
As we try to improve the efficiency and reliability, we try to abstract a lot of things so that the complexity is hidden and whatever we are trying to achieve becomes much more modular. But the challenge with abstraction is most people will not know the complexity and if something goes wrong, there will be very few people who will be able to fix those issues and if couple of such issues can lead to a catastrophic event that could lead to the termination of the human race/entity itself. In general, abstraction leads to improvement in efficiency and reliability, but reduces the resiliency of the systems and communities.
Just want to make sure that your entity or your organisation is resilient make sure that you make the process efficient so that you become profitable but at the same time make sure that there are enough people who understand the underlying complexity and can fix those things when required, even if there is no real need for it. this is the cost of continuity on longer time frames.
One of the ways of making sure that you are resilient just to make sure that your systems and processes or facing the unknown and those obstructions which can break your systems when you are under control and you have slack. Chaos monkeys a good concept which can simulates these kind of events.
Let us say one of the engineers in your team is very good obviously it makes sense to make the most out of him and make sure that like pick it most of the work done as soon as possible but at the same time we make sure that he doesn't become a single point of failure. One way of making sure that we find a balance between both these two things is making sure that your top performer works on the biggest challenges that are available but at the same time gives knowledge transfers to others in the team. Whenever you don't have anything critical you make sure that you send him on a leave for 15 days so that so that you know that he's not a single point of failure and others in your team can step up and make sure that it is business as usual.
https://twitter.com/antonystanley09/status/1517227246138060800?t=YLJ6Afrpk41OdOWNxSyM0A&s=19
X - Replace later was one such example which made sure that when audio systems are built for efficiency and not resilience what happens in case of a catastrophic event. what is the use of achieving highest levels of efficiency when your own survival is at risk. Building redundancies into the system is one of the easiest ways of making sure that you are resilient. Having a plan for how will you handle in cases of catastrophic events can also lessen the blow when one such event actually happens.
The full quote is
“Amateurs talk about strategy and tactics. Professionals talk about logistics and sustainability in warfare” was said by Robert Hilliard Barrow (1922-2008), a United States Marine Corps four-star general, in an interview published in the San Diego (CA) Union on November 11, 1979.
My notes from Leverage points to intervene in a system
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All notes