Heroes Not Zombies

Here’s where I’m for “efficiency” – in machines and in situations where you can accurately predict the outcomes.

Here’s where I’m against “efficiency” – in human situations. Human beings, all other living creatures, Nature and the environment are all complex, open systems. You cannot predict the outcomes with accuracy and certainty from any starting point. For three reasons – change is constant (nothing stays the same), everything is connected so subject to unpredicted influences, and the phenomenon of “emergence” where a complex system develops new characteristics and behaviours which couldn’t have been predicted from its prior state.

Everywhere you look in Nature you find something called “redundancy” – natural systems have more checks and balances, more options in play, than logic would lead you to believe was either necessary or “efficient”. This is the key to their robustness.

As Professor Margaret Heffernan, author of “Uncharted”, points out, aircraft are built with more control systems than they “need”. They have more engines than they “need”. It’s these backups, alternatives and “redundancies” which make a plane robust. She clarifies the difference between “resilience” which is the ability to recover, and “robustness” which is the ability to avoid failure in the first place.

Austerity economics plus managerial philosophies of “efficiency” plus neoliberal politics created the perfect conditions for the pandemic to be a disaster. In many, many countries the health care services had been cut to the bone. They weren’t robust. In many countries social care services had been cut to the bone. They weren’t robust either. In many countries industry, employment conditions, education…..you name it, had all been pared back, trimmed down, downsized, made “more efficient” by under-resourcing them, failing to replace staff who left, and, in fact, doing the exact opposite of developing and strengthening any of them.

How do we cope better with the next pandemic?

Well a good place to start would be to set our sights on “robustness” instead of “efficiency”. After all, in human beings and in all of Nature, the future cannot be predicted, the exact outcomes cannot be known. We are not machines.

Ok, you’re asking, what’s all that got to do with a table of pumpkins at a market? Well, that photo is from a fabulous Saturday morning farmers market in Capetown, and I love this display of diversity and abundance. I love how DIFFERENT they all are! No standardisation by size, shape of colour. Nature is like that. Diversity, abundance and redundancy are key features of healthy natural systems.