Efficiency or Resilience

How resilient is your organisation, your relationships, your community, your country?

What we've seen over the last few months is our collective inability to properly manage expectations and execution in regards to this balance. 

And I’m not just talking about supply-chains of medical equipment in regards to COVID-19, or about the BLM protests around the world, or the economic impacts we will feel for years to come. I’m talking about all of them, collectively, and ultimately the lack of balance that continuously leads us down the road of sacrificing resilience for efficiency.

I use this formula to balance most things in my life, and build layers of resilience on top of each other where possible, to create a compounding factor. In work, this usually means that by the time a decision is left to others, you have hopefully been able to introduce enough balance to off-set decisions that might be taken to reach for that efficiency.

Being effective in building resilience, doesn’t mean you can’t achieve effectiveness, it’s more that you’re playing on a different timeline. If you have a clear agenda, good execution, you can reach full efficiency within the cap, and also achieve well functioning resilience. 

If your agenda is unclear, and your timelines are not yours, this is ultimately impossible. And on all levels, be it government, or your households economics, you will suffer when something happens, because reaching that ultimate level of efficiency, will mean you are sacrificing to get there, leaving you and others potentially vulnerable, as we see time and time again when our frameworks collapse due to the weight of pressure we put on them.