Inefficiency is necessary for progress
Failures happen when we take risks, and slack aids recovery.
To make progress, we have to take risks.
But if we take risks, there will be failures.
To recover from failure, additional resource is required.
But, often, in “market driven” organisations, with short-term goals, additional resource is denied - deemed inefficient and wasteful.
Which stifles the organisation’s ability to take risks.
Which costs them a lot more in the long-run, as they can’t make progress.
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Nassim Taleb’s book ‘Anti-fragile: Things That Gain from Disorder’ “explores how you should act in a world that is becoming increasingly volatile. According to him, we have allowed efficiency thinking to optimize our world to such an extent that we have lost the flexibility and slack that is necessary for dealing with failure. This is why we can no longer handle any form of risk…
“We need failure to be able to learn, we need inefficiency to be able to recover from mistakes, we have to take risks to make progress and so it is imperative to find a way to celebrate imperfection.”
Hans de Zwart,
Director of Bits of Freedom, a Digital Civil Rights Organisation in the Netherlands.
"What we glorify as efficiency is now vulnerability.”
The Guardian 7 March 2026
Prof Tim Lang:
“The default position that others can feed us is hardwired into the British state system, and indeed into the nature of how agrifood capitalism works in Britain. Others are wiser. Other countries are stockpiling,” he said. “Other countries have much more flexibility in their systems than we do. What we glorify as efficiency is now vulnerability.”
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/mar/07/uk-stockpile-food-climate-shocks-war