There is often a tension between efficiency (capacity to perform extremely well under specific, anticipated conditions) and resilience (capacity to perform reasonably well under varied or unpredictable conditions).
e.g. Financial analysis prizes efficiency and doesn't apprehend deficits in resilience, often to catastrophic effect.1
But overcommitment to generality (resilience) is a problem too: “If you squint, you will find the same set of tradeoffs in all manner of creative work and systems thinking: think cookie-cutter suburban development, standardized testing, internet platforms, fast fashion, AI therapists, and multi-purpose kitchen tools. All of these opt for the flexibility of the generic over the expressiveness of the specific.”2
“Optimization” is generally a process of making a system more efficient and less resilient. See Against optimization
Laziness can be seen as a way of trading efficiency for resilience. Unused capacity is usually “wasted” but can be quickly deployed to address emergencies or opportunities.
A place like this evolves the healthy laziness that keeps animals from moving their body parts all the time, needlessly burning calories, in order for the claws, wings and tails to get a good performance review from their head at the end of the year. Sure, many people do nothing much of the time, and you need some effort to make them do something when it becomes necessary; “the hedgehog is too proud a bird to fly without a kick,” as the wise Russian proverb goes. But on the upside, nobody doing anything unless it’s really necessary means you don’t have all this unnecessary stuff. Healthy laziness begets agility - you have way less code, less systems, less everything, and therefore way more ability to maneuver and actually change things with a small number of motivated people - and there’s always a small number of motivated people in any place, and this place might even keep them, if they learn to bargain for raises. And you also don’t need to grow as much, because you don’t need to be adding people to take care of all these sprawling systems that you quickly come to depend on.3
Roger L. Martin, “The High Price of Efficiency,” Harvard Business Review, January 1, 2019, https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-high-price-of-efficiency.
Elan Ullendorff, “Should This Be a Map or 500 Maps?,” Substack newsletter (escape the algorithm, June 11, 2024), https://escapethealgorithm.substack.com/p/should-this-be-a-map-or-500-maps.
Yossi Kreinin, “Advantages of Incompetent Management,” July 4, 2024, https://yosefk.com/blog/advantages-of-incompetent-management.html.