How many bags is too many bags?

A bag hoarder’s take on resilience versus efficiency

I have a problem, and it’s time to admit it. 

I collect bags. Hundreds and hundreds of plastic bags.

This week my girlfriend and I went through my cupboards in the hunt for useful storage space. In the last 7 years of living in my flat I’ve accumulated literally hundreds and hundreds of plastic bags. Bags full of bags stored within other bags of bags. Fractal bag-ception of all types; shitty one use-ers, enough ‘bags for life’ for a thousand lifetimes. Every size, thickness, logo design and handle length. Precious cupboard space that could have been used for - you know - useful stuff in cupboards had been ceded to bags of bags that I’ve never used. 

Confronting years of ‘maybe I’ll need this someday’ thinking, I wondered how I’d come to this point. I believe that the the answer lies in the opposing trade-offs of resilience and efficiency.

Resilience is being able to withstand change, and never being short of resources when you need them. You could argue that my storing of bags ‘just in case’ is a kind of over-emphasis on resilience. Do you know that feeling where you need a plastic bag? I don’t. I’ve always got one. There are always enough bags for my needs. 

This kind of resilience has a usefulness. Instead of having to miss opportunities to give a friend a loaf of bread because I don’t have anything to carry it in, I have a bag. Whenever I want to go to the sauna, I have a bag to hand to take my wet clothes home in. In my bag-topia I’m able to handle lots of different kinds of bag-related situations. 

On the other side of the spectrum from resilience is efficiency. Efficiency is about minimising waste, and only spending the minimum resources and energy to pursue your goal.

Maximum efficiency in the bag-topia would be having exactly the right number of bags for my needs and no more. That would be efficient with both my usage of the bags (ie no bags sitting unused for years at the back of a cupboard) and efficient in terms of shelf space (having free shelf space for other goals and saving time looking for stuff in the cupboard). Efficiency is *not* me taking up useful shelf-space resource in my home with hundreds of bags I’m not using. 

Sometimes it’s good to emphasize efficiency. When resources like time or money are scarce, spending them in ways that optimally help you towards your goals is adaptive and beneficial. Now my girlfriend has moved in and we have to fit two people’s worth of stuff in the flat, storage space became more important. The huge bags of bags now are obviously inefficient and costly.

Similarly if a problem domain is very well known and unchanging, efficiency can take priority. I only need one toaster because 99% of my toast needs can be met with just the one toaster. Having a cheese toastie maker as well might make me more resilient to toast requirements but I eat grilled cheese so rarely that having a second type of toaster is inefficient.

These two extremes - resilience and efficiency - are in a constant trade-off with each other in our lives. Our brain biology is one reflection of this. In a fully ‘resilient’ network such as the brain, every neuron would be connected to every other and each brain function would take place across the whole brain through different pathways, such that if a knock on the head damaged the neurons performing a certain function, you would have plenty of other neurons to take their place. This brain would be resilient but not very efficient. Sending every message to lots of neurons with duplication takes lots of energy and time to get the job done. 

In a work sense, a resilient workplace might be one in which everyone is informed about literally everything that is going on in the company or one in which everyone can do everyone else’s job. This could be maladaptive - if you get email memos about every irrelevant development that doesn’t help you with your job, or if your calendar is full of update meetings and catchups that don’t serve you and your goals it’s hard to get anything done. A fictional ‘fully’ resilient organisation would be so inefficient that zero resources would be spent on achieving the goal. Nothing would work. 

It could also be adaptive, depending on the context. You need some duplication and redundancy so that you can respond to change. If officer first aid monitor Larry is the only one who knows where the first aid kit is, that’s not a problem unless Larry happens to be off work with laryngitis. It’s better to have lots of people know where the first aid kit lives so that we know where to find it regardless of absences and unforeseen circumstances. 

On the other end of the spectrum is efficiency. In a fully efficient brain for example, neuronal impulses would be sent via the minimal number of neurons to pass on the message and no more. This would be quick and use up less energy than a fully resilient brain. On the other hand if you get hit with a big stick and some of your neurons lose connection with each other you would lose lots of useful function with no backup.

A fully efficient organisation would minimise the energy required to do one task. Florence is the only one who can update the website. Again as long as nothing changes, it’s probably efficient for Florence to do that work rather than having two people do what one person can do. As soon as Florence gets the flu however then nobody can do her work and we have paid the price of over-efficiency. Efficiency gets in the way of resilience. Efficiency is brittle to change. 

In reality our brains and our organisations have elements of resilience and efficiency. The brain is able to regain some functions after injury or a stroke in a set of processes known as neuroplasticity. So too our organisations and teams will embody a balance between resilience and efficiency. I know the organisations I’ve worked in have always struggled somewhat with this balance - for example how many meetings is too many or too few meetings. You could argue that lots of meetings to involve lots of people in decision making is a kind of resilience. The opposite is the right people not being involved in the right decisions at the right time. 

My hypothesis is that if we bring this trade-off concept to our teams and organisations, perhaps it will bring to the surface some bubbling tensions. An organisation can be both over efficient in some areas and over resilient in others. You could have one brilliant team member who is needed to do everything and has a role in many projects. This is a kind of efficiency until that team member leaves or is maxed out and you realise quite how much they knew when everything grinds to a halt. 

In the same organisation the team members are spending so much time documenting decisions, sharing their work and making sure that every decision is risk mitigated, fully communicated everyone and bomb-proofed that everything takes forever to get done, an overly resilient pattern. 

I challenge you to look at some of the dysfunctions and problems you find in your teams and organisations and put them through this lens. What does it open up for you when you frame the problems as resilience-efficiency trade-offs?

In a complex and dynamic world, a team’s intelligence is related to its ability to navigate trade-offs like this effectively. Well-defined problems need efficiency to minimise waste. Ill-defined problems need resilience to make sure you’re finding the good solutions and optimising for uncertainty. In the agile world we tend to start off by treating our problems as ill-defined, complex ones where exploration of an unknown space is the most important approach.

Agile practices are mostly about emphasising resilience over efficiency, because we understand and assume that being efficient at solving a problem you don’t yet understand won’t achieve your outcome. You’ll just move quickly to the wrong destination.

The best agile teams I work with however are able to negotiate both ends of this trade off. With known and defined problems, they tip towards efficiency and minimise waste. When it comes to the unknown and the exploratory (e.g. 'what does our customer want?’ and ‘how do we build this software?’) they index towards resilient and exploratory practices even if they are ‘inefficient’. Being able to dynamically switch your team’s mode between efficiency and resilience according to what your problem domain needs from you is a key driver for team intelligence.

So next time your team is struggling with something, ask them - how many bags do you really need in the cupboard?

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