since then, resilience has become the main buzz. the other two concepts — robustness and redundancy — have either slipped aside, or been subordinated to resilience. greer’s article reflects this. sure, he poses an interesting contrast between resilience and efficiency. but he adopts a narrow view of resilience that depends too much on robustness. his bridge example reflects this.

most writings i see about enhancing resilience nowadays are less about adding robustness than about finding innovative ways to assure multi-use adaptations and substitutabilities. that’s a broader concept of resilience, and it is preferable to the one greer uses above.

in other words, i agree with your cautions and caveats. onward.

Excellent points from Kevin and Kragen.

Getting back to the bridge, steel is more resilient than concrete, but not because it contains more unused resources. It’s just that steel is more flexible than concrete, and even when its flexibility is surpassed, its yield behavior is different: when it’s overstressed, it stretches and hardens in the direction of the overstress instead of just cracking.

Our society and economy can do the same thing. It’s true that the optimal program for resiliency isn’t the optimal program for efficiency, but there are plenty of things we can do that will improve both resiliency and efficiency. The rapid communications networks used for JIT delivery, for example, are also very useful for recovering from catastrophes. Standardized screw thread profiles improve both efficiency (by allowing greater division of labor) and resiliency (by reducing the number of different parts needed.)

Hi Kevin, the standard argument is I believe that resilience does require a certain amount of redundancy, and I think this is correct; ‘stockage’ is a little different; in the context of open book mgt and negotatiated coordination, something probably taking place ‘naturally’ in the context you describe, a certain amount of stockage can be avoided through the knowledge of the allocation by others. But in any case, in a normal context, not of hypercompetition, you would like to have some stockage available for emergencies and such.

And just-in-time production is not necessarily less resilient. It’s only less resilient under the artificial conditions of corporate globalization, where long-distance supply chains based on fleets of trucks and container ships are vulnerable to disruption. But the really serious lean manufacturing theorists and consultants (e.g. John Womack) argue that lean is incompatible with oceans. The ideal manifestation of JIT is the networked manufacturing economy of Emilia-Romagna, where the different steps in the supply chain are in job shops co-located in the same area.