#SystemsThinkingDay2 – Why do people often sacrifice resilience for productivity or some other immediately recognizable system property?
Injections of genetically engineered bovine growth hormone increase the milk production of a cow without proportionally increasing the cow’s intake.
The hormone diverts some of the cow’s metabolic energy from other bodily functions to milk production.
The cost of increased production is lowered resilience – the cow is less healthy, less long-lived and more dependent on human management
Resilience is not being static or constant over time
Static stability is something you can see and measured by variation in the condition of a system – week by week or year by year
Resilience is something that is hard to see unless you exceed the systems’ limits
You see this repeated across systems – in the way we prioritize for short term timber over the ecological impact to the short term focus on productivity vs hiring the right person for the role.
“Systems need to be managed not only for productivity or stability, they also need to be managed for resilience— the ability to recover from perturbation, the ability to restore or repair themselves.”
This is from one of the most useful books I have ever read – Thinking in Systems: A Primer, by Donella H. Meadows, Diana Wright
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#day2 – Resilience. Stay tuned for more on the series
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