Fleming believed that progress has pure limits. Issues develop to maturity—youngsters into adults, saplings into bushes, startups into full-fledged corporations—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 keep up its personal infrastructure. It turns into much less and fewer environment friendly at conserving anybody individual clothed, fed, and sheltered. He known as this the “intensification paradox”: The more durable everybody works to make the GDP line level up, the more durable 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 organize for, plan for, and the best way to try this is with the lacking metric: resilience.
Fleming affords a number of definitions of resilience, the briefest of which is “the flexibility of a system to deal with shock.” He describes two varieties: preventive resilience, which helps you keep an present state despite shocks, and recovery-elastic resilience, which helps you adapt shortly to a brand new post-shock state. Development will not assist you with resilience, Fleming argues. Solely group will. He is large on the “casual economic system”—suppose Craigslist and Purchase Nothing, not Amazon. Folks 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 hearth off to your cellphone: Decelerate! Cease promoting! As a substitute of income, it might measure relationships shaped, barters fulfilled, merchandise loaned and reused. It might replicate all types of non-transactional actions that make an organization resilient: Is the gross sales crew doing sufficient yoga? Are the workplace canines 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 principally HR software program for Burning Man, which, properly, I am undecided that is the world I wish to dwell in both. Should you give you a superb resilience funnel, let me know. Such a product would carry out very badly within the market (assuming you possibly can even measure that).
The basic drawback is that the stuff that creates resilience will not ever present up within the analytics. For 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 usually they put down the app and meet up in individual 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 previous acoustic guitar from the attic in trade for, I do not know, a beehive. Whole Earth stuff. You know the way 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 may wing a bunch of obscure, summary stats and make pronouncements. God is aware of I’ve achieved a variety of that earlier than. However there is not any metric, actually, that may seize it. Which implies I’ve to speak to strangers, politely, about issues they’re attempting to resolve.
I hate this conclusion. I wish to push out content material and see traces transfer and make no extra small speak. I would like my freaking charts. That is why I like tech. Benchmarks, CPU speeds, onerous drive sizes, bandwidth, customers, level releases, income. I really like when the quantity goes up. It is nearly unimaginable to think about a world the place it does not. Or slightly it was once.
This text seems within the November 2023 subject. Subscribe now.