Stop designing for efficiency, design for resilience instead

Over the last few years, there has been a rise in talking about resilience, in an organisational sense, which I think is a positive. However while there has been a lot of talk of resilience, in practice we have still been designing for efficiency, which in social purpose organisations means we are designing for the opposite of resilience, for brittleness.

We are sold efficiency over and over. A quick search for products and services will show you how often efficiency is used as the hook. I get it, it's easy to imagine cost savings, time savings. There is often a link made between waste and efficiency. Eliminating waste and improving efficiency is one of the most common political tropes of our time. But complex systems involving people are not Sankey diagrams. And efficiency is a trap.

Look, I don't think efficiency in itself is bad. In fact in systems where you can the inputs, control the conditions, efficiency is a good thing. However even in cases lie these there is often a tipping point, after which resilience and reliability must take priority. Finding the gradient on the curve or sweet spot is crucial. Let's look at two examples data centres & motor racing. Both involve technology and fairly set parameters. For both, efficiency is a necessity.

In data centres, the whole point is getting as much computing power out of as little energy as possible. Efficiency means profits. But if you run servers flat-out nonstop, sooner or later something breaks. Companies need to balance efficiency with reliability, because customers want a service that always works. Downtime is a business killer. That's why they deliberately build in extra servers, backups, and spare capacity.

Formula 1 teams also chase maximum efficiency - lighter cars, more power, optimal aerodynamics. But push it too far, and engines blow up, tyres fail, races end early. The challenge is knowing exactly where to draw that line between performance and failure.

So even in these situations where there are tightly controlled scenarios, efficiency is only one consideration, even if a big one. But what happens when you're working in environments where most things are outside your control? Like, say, 99% of social purpose organisations dealing with unpredictable changes in policy, funding, climate, or community needs?

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If we design for efficiency in these situations, we are ensuring there's hardly any slack. When conditions are perfect, this is great. But as soon as conditions change (and they always, always change), these systems become brittle.

Efficient systems usually cut redundancy first to save resources. Redundancy isn't waste, it's a safety net. If we can't spend time on building relationships, on looking up and out, rather than down and in, we can't anticipate change. If we don't have the finances to ride out a change in the funding landscape, or a rise in demand, we can't respond. If we don't have any time to reimagine how we do things, we can't adapt.

Organisations that chase efficiency above everything else end up losing slack. Without slack, you have no space for innovation, no time to learn, and no room for mistakes. Institutional memory and culture vanish quickly when roles seen as "non-essential" are cut. Just look at the NHS or local councils running flat-out; when crisis hits, there's no room to adapt. It's happening again.

We can look around us in nature to see efficiency and resilience in action. Imagine two forests. The first is a perfectly planted, uniform pine plantation, every tree identical, growing quickly, easy to harvest. It’s incredibly efficient at producing timber, but a single disease, or a change in water supply, or a rise in temperature can wipe it out completely. Now imagine a rainforest: messy, dense, chaotic. No two trees are the same, and it's full of redundancy. It might not produce as much timber per acre, but if something changes, like weather, pests, disease, there’s enough diversity that the forest adjusts, adapts, and survives. It thrives through its messy complexity, not despite it.

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For social purpose organisations this means choosing effectiveness over efficiency, it means resiliency. It means collaborating openly, genuinely learning from each other, and not tying ourselves to rigid systems and processes that can’t adapt to change. When we rely too heavily on technological solutions designed solely for efficiency, we become vulnerable as soon as the conditions shift. We need to invest in people.

For funders and commissioners, it means investing in redundancy, prioritising learning and collaboration, and valuing rest and innovation. If we want real, lasting impact we need environments where people have the space and freedom to experiment, reflect, and respond creatively. And we need to model this ourselves. I say this often: what those with money say influences how others act. Think about building resiliency into every fund, every commission, you'll get more effective organisations and more resilient systems.