Saved by Keely Adler and
Against Optimization
Life is not like that. It is variable. It changes whether we plan for it or not. Our systems need to be flexible to adapt to this variation.
Tonianne DeMaria Barry • Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life
“Think of efficiency as a high-performance engine. Under perfect conditions, it delivers maximum power and minimum waste. However, that very efficiency makes it less robust. Highly efficient systems have no slack, no redundancy, and therefore no resilience and no spare capacity.” — Helen Lewis, The Atlantic, 26 March 2020
Medium • 11: Post-traumatic urbanism and radical indigenism
Convergence forces us to eliminate options, make trade-offs, and decide what is truly essential.
Tiago Forte • Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential
In general, “resilience shifts attention from purely growth and efficiency to needed recovery and flexibility. Growth and efficiency alone can often lead ecological systems, businesses and societies into fragile rigidities, exposing them to turbulent transformations.
Daniel Wahl • Designing Regenerative Cultures
Resilience is a measure of how well a system can absorb shocks and use disturbances to spur renewal and innovation.
David Ehrlichman • Impact Networks: Create Connection, Spark Collaboration, and Catalyze Systemic Change
changing your objective from making your own unit as efficient as possible to helping your organization produce as much value as possible doesn’t need to reduce the quality or sustainability of the work involved.