Fleming believed that progress has pure limits. Issues develop to maturity—children into adults, saplings into timber, startups into full-fledged firms—however progress past that time is, in his phrases, a “pathology” and an “affliction.” The larger and extra productive an economy will get, he argued, the extra assets it must burn to take care of its personal infrastructure. It turns into much less and fewer environment friendly at preserving anybody particular person clothed, fed, and sheltered. He known as this the “intensification paradox”: The tougher everybody works to make the GDP line level up, the tougher everybody has to work to make the GDP line level up. Inevitably, Fleming believed, progress will flip to degrowth, intensification to deintensification. These are issues to arrange for, plan for, and the best way to do this is with the lacking metric: resilience.
Fleming affords a number of definitions of resilience, the briefest of which is “the power of a system to deal with shock.” He describes two sorts: preventive resilience, which helps you preserve an current state despite shocks, and recovery-elastic resilience, which helps you adapt rapidly to a brand new post-shock state. Progress will not provide help to with resilience, Fleming argues. Solely group will. He is massive on the “casual economic system”—assume Craigslist and Purchase Nothing, not Amazon. Individuals serving to individuals.
So I started to think about, in my hypocritical coronary heart, an analytics platform that will measure resilience in these phrases. As progress shot too excessive, notifications would fireplace off to your cellphone: Decelerate! Cease promoting! As a substitute of income, it might measure relationships fashioned, barters fulfilled, merchandise loaned and reused. It will replicate all kinds of non-transactional actions that make an organization resilient: Is the gross sales staff doing sufficient yoga? Are the workplace canine getting sufficient pets? Within the analytics assembly, we might ask questions like “Is the product low-cost sufficient for everybody?” I even tried to sketch out a resilience funnel, the place the juice that drips down is individuals checking in on their neighbors. It was an attention-grabbing train, however what I ended up imagining was mainly HR software program for Burning Man, which, effectively, I am undecided that is the world I wish to reside in both. If you happen to provide you with an excellent resilience funnel, let me know. Such a product would carry out very badly within the market (assuming you may even measure that).
The elemental drawback is that the stuff that creates resilience will not ever present up within the analytics. As an example you had been constructing a chat app. If individuals chat extra utilizing your app, that is good, proper? That is group! However the actually good quantity, from a resilience perspective, is how typically they put down the app and meet up in particular person to hash issues out. As a result of that can result in somebody coming by the home with lasagna when another person has Covid, or somebody giving somebody’s child an outdated acoustic guitar from the attic in trade for, I do not know, a beehive. Whole Earth stuff. You understand how it really works.
All of this considerably responsible operating round led me again to the only reply: I can not measure resilience. I imply, certain, I might wing a bunch of obscure, summary stats and make pronouncements. God is aware of I’ve finished lots of that earlier than. However there isn’t any metric, actually, that may seize it. Which suggests I’ve to speak to strangers, politely, about issues they’re making an attempt to unravel.
I hate this conclusion. I wish to push out content material and see strains transfer and make no extra small discuss. I would like my freaking charts. That is why I like tech. Benchmarks, CPU speeds, arduous drive sizes, bandwidth, customers, level releases, income. I like when the quantity goes up. It is nearly inconceivable to think about a world the place it does not. Or fairly it was.
This text seems within the November 2023 concern. Subscribe now.
