At a basic level, resilience is the ability for something to withstand disruption. Efficiency is the quest for optimal output with minimum waste. Resilience and efficiency are not in direct opposition, however focusing too much on one can have a negative impact on the other.
For much of my career I’ve been tasked with designing ‘resilience’ into systems. This often meant identifying single points of failure — a hard disk, a server, a network link, a building or even a member of staff — and ensuring that the business could still deliver value if something failed or was suddenly absent.
For at least as many years I’ve been asked to deliver efficiency. Sometimes this was just making sensible procurement decisions and cutting costs appropriately, but in later years I spent more time looking at highly efficient systems, and because I work in technology these tended to be efficient, complex systems; the kind of systems that true ‘lean’ thinking excels at improving.
Efficiency and resilience are two important considerations for any business with long term aspirations, and often there is a direct compromise to be made between the two. Sometimes they can work in opposition to each other, but occasionally they can be combined for a best of both worlds scenario.
