That efficiency and increased productivity can lead to a diminished resilience is now widely accepted in within the Resiliency Science field as represented by say, The Resiliency Alliance. This awareness is far from the minds of government, business and community planning however. Complexity Scientist and Santa Fe Institute Fellow, Sander van der Leeuw, said it this way at the recent Resiliency 2011 Conference: “Innovation has become a Ponzi scheme!”

Indeed, it was my own with the lack of a broader and deeper reference point for progress and success that led me to drop out of business consulting for many years…leading ultimately to the Wild Resiliency model.

Here is a bit more from the abstract/summary of Sander’s paper: Complexity Problems in Innovation.

Many people expect that ‘innovation’ will lead us out of the current
sustainability mess we’re in, yet do not realize that three centuries of
innovation (i.e. the industrial revolution and its aftermath) got us into the
mess in the first place. Not only do we have difficulty defining sustainability,
but we do not really know how innovation works. Most research has focused
either on the conditions under which it occurs (e.g. Florida) or on the results
(e.g. ‘the new economy’). This is not surprising, as our intellectual and
scientific tradition is essentially reductionist, and therefore not likely to help
us understand creativity, invention, innovation or in general the emergence of
new phenomena. The paper will argue that this approach is responsible for
the emergence of ‘unanticipated problems’, and that these ‘unanticipated
problems’ are likely to overwhelm us unless we change our perspective into
a generative one. I will then analyze some of the barriers to such a generative
approach, and argue that the complex adaptive systems approach is part of
a trend to begin to deal with this issue.

I’ve been following that lead for some time, and working on the details from an empirical natural systems physics approach. My initial discovery, that facing ever escalating crises is a natural consequence of trying to stabilize growth, still seems to go close to the heart of it.

That makes everyone try to meet challenges of ever escalating scale and complexity, a real problem. That was the mode of societal failure I described in my first essay on it, from 1979, “The Infinite Society – growth induced collapse”, [www.synapse9.com/pub/UnhidPatt-theInfiniteSoc.pdf]. fyi find my more recent work and the basic natural systems physics I developed from my blog “Reading Natural Signals” [www.synapse9.com/blog]

I can fill in details, but the simple response is that the best reason not to go through with it is that it’s unprofitable. So there’s a need to discover how the choices that cause it could be turned in a better direction. Trying to suppress it might well just create even more intense challenges rather than relieve them… is one of the important cautions. You need the switch for which there is no resistance.

Nearly everyone asked says they’re subject to control by the system, though, and so have no choice but to follow in the rut with everyone else. So someone is failing to imagine the alternative. I think what people need to do is discover the profit seeking choice that would change the other choices, and relieve the pressure to accelerate on the system as a whole. There seem to be lots of examples in nature to learn from when you start looking for them.

thanks for your work…