My morning miles went very well today, much to my surprise. I felt limber and as strong as I needed to be — so tomorrow I’ll probably stumble along for a two-mile stagger. Then coffee, finishing up reading tutorial essays, fruit, Morning Prayer, the X3 to Oxford (slow as molasses inbound on the Abingdon Road), two good tutes, lunch at Oriel, and now home again.
In the course of my day, I noticed (via my RSS feed! RSS for the win!) Lucy Bellwood’s repost of Mandy Brown’s approving comments on excerpts from Deb Chacra’s How Infrastructure Works, viz.:
“But you can’t optimize systems in a context that’s changing, especially if it’s changing in unpredictable ways. Removing inefficiencies when circumstances are as anticipated means that there isn’t much slack in the system to respond when the unanticipated happens. Optimization is intrinsically brittle, because it’s about closely matching the output to the conditions, which means it’s vulnerable if those conditions change. What we’ll need from our infrastructural systems, more and more, is for them to be resilient, able to absorb uncertainty and changing circumstances either without failing or by failing gracefully and reversibly, rather than unexpectedly or catastrophically.”(Deb Chachra, How Infrastructure Works, p. 249)
“Making systems resilient is fundamentally at odds with optimization, because optimizing a system means taking out any slack. A truly optimized, and thus efficient, system is only possible with near-perfect knowledge about the system, together with the ability to observe and implement a response.
For a system to be reliable, on the other hand, there have to be some unused resources to draw on when the unexpected happens, which, well, happens predictably.” (Deb Chachra, How Infrastructure Works, p. 209)Another way to look at this is that you cannot optimize for resilience. Resilience requires a kind of elasticity, an ability to stretch and reach but then to return, to spring back into a former shape—or perhaps to shapeshift into something new if the circumstances require it. Resilience is stretchy where optimization is brittle; resilience invites change where optimization demands continuity. (Mandy Brown)
I’ve been reminding Fr Paul for weeks now that there’s no slack in the system, and this is just what I had in mind. Even without the change/continuity angle (with which I have some quibbles), the bare fact is that ‘optimising’ itself entails eliminating the resource — the slack — that can equip people to deal with unanticipated stresses.Take away that slack, and you’re as much as saying ‘Let the stresses take their course’, harming both the goals of work and the workers who have to fight through to remain as close to the goals as possible.