A friend was talking about building resilient systems today, something Seth covered at length in Akimbo (S4 Ep 20)… and also in this blog post:
Systems with slack are more resilient. The few extra minutes of time aren’t wasted, the same way that a bike helmet isn’t wasted if you don’t have a crash today. That buffer will save the day, sooner or later.
Seth Godin – Seths.blog
Resilient systems have slack (spare capacity to handle unexpected demands) and redundancies (spare capacity to cover essential functions if something fails).
The best ways to add resilience to your organisation are to find friends and champions, to document things well enough that you can share them, and to aim for effectiveness rather than 100% efficiency.
Final sentence with 3 things of course joined by needing to leave slack. So much could be said, and you have said, on all four of them. Really helpful. So easy to rush from one thing to another. To not cultivate relationships with friends and champions. To not pause to write things down so people can pick up after you. To not have the slack to debrief from one meeting to the next, to be trying to be so efficient you lose effectiveness. Thanks for these.