FEATURE2 November 2020

Margaret Heffernan in seven

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Covid-19 Features Impact

In the latest of Impact’s In Seven series, entrepreneur and writer Margaret Heffernan discusses resilience and leadership.

Margaret Heffernan_crop

1. How can businesses prepare for the future at such an uncertain time?

The first step is to understand how little of the future can be predicted with accuracy. The second is to understand the difference between work that is complicated – which is linear and where all factors and influences are known and measurable – and the complex, which is non-linear, multifactorial to a degree that all factors can’t be seen at once, and subject to immense change, so expertise can’t always keep up. You should appreciate that the complex is made more dangerous with efficiency and needs human judgement, and the complicated should be optimised for efficiency to free up resources, time and attention for the complex.

2. What can Covid-19 teach us about resilience?

That running entire systems for efficiency amplified dangers and costs. That is one consequence of treating everything as though it should be optimised for efficiency. Resilience in complex systems lies in robustness ...