Fleming believed that progress has pure limits. Issues develop to maturity—children 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 retaining anybody individual clothed, fed, and sheltered. He referred to 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 do 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 regardless of shocks, and recovery-elastic resilience, which helps you adapt rapidly to a brand new post-shock state. Development will not enable you to with resilience, Fleming argues. Solely neighborhood will. He is massive on the “casual economic system”—assume 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 may measure resilience in these phrases. As progress shot too excessive, notifications would fireplace off to your cellphone: Decelerate! Cease promoting! As an alternative of income, it could measure relationships shaped, barters fulfilled, merchandise loaned and reused. It could mirror all kinds of non-transactional actions that make an organization resilient: Is the gross sales crew 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, nicely, I am undecided that is the world I need to reside in both. In the event you provide you with an excellent resilience funnel, let me know. Such a product would carry out very badly within the market (assuming you could possibly 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 neighborhood! 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 may 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 working round led me again to the only reply: I can not measure resilience. I imply, certain, I may wing a bunch of imprecise, summary stats and make pronouncements. God is aware of I’ve completed loads of that earlier than. However there isn’t any metric, actually, that may seize it. Which implies I’ve to speak to strangers, politely, about issues they’re making an attempt to unravel.
I hate this conclusion. I need to push out content material and see strains transfer and make no extra small speak. I need 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 not possible to think about a world the place it would not. Or slightly it was once.
This text seems within the November 2023 problem. Subscribe now.