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 financial system 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 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 sorts: preventive resilience, which helps you keep an present state regardless of shocks, and recovery-elastic resilience, which helps you adapt shortly to a brand new post-shock state. Development will not assist you to with resilience, Fleming argues. Solely group will. He is huge on the “casual financial system”—assume Craigslist and Purchase Nothing, not Amazon. Individuals serving to folks.
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 a substitute of income, it might measure relationships shaped, barters fulfilled, merchandise loaned and reused. It could 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 folks checking in on their neighbors. It was an fascinating train, however what I ended up imagining was principally HR software program for Burning Man, which, effectively, I am undecided that is the world I wish to reside in both. In case you provide you with a great resilience funnel, let me know. Such a product would carry out very badly within the market (assuming you can even measure that).
The basic drawback is that the stuff that creates resilience will not ever present up within the analytics. For instance you had been constructing a chat app. If folks 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 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 change for, I do not know, a beehive. Entire 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 imprecise, summary stats and make pronouncements. God is aware of I’ve executed loads of that earlier than. However there is no 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 discuss. I would like my freaking charts. That is why I like tech. Benchmarks, CPU speeds, exhausting 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 challenge. Subscribe now.