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Robustness, resilience, and the maturation of startups, a thread. 1/7
Per @ddwoods2, there's a tradeoff between being robust (good at handling known unknowns) and being resilient (good at handling unknown unknowns). In general, you want both, what Woods calls "net adaptive value". 2/7
Startups don't have the resources to invest in robustness: they need to focus all of their development effort into adding business value, because they're fighting to survive. 3/7
Since startup systems lack robustness, they are often in firefighting mode: when problems arise, they throw people at them. If the people involved are effective, then they make it through. That's resilience! 4/7
But relying entirely on resilience is expensive, because you need skilled humans for this, and they can burn out. As startups mature into larger companies, they rationally invest in building robustness into their system. 5/7
The danger is learning the wrong lesson: "using humans to solve system problems is bad, building robust systems is good". The companies only learned about insufficient robustness, not insufficient resilience. 6/7
It seems to be much more difficult for orgs to learn that they are insufficiently resilient. The temptation is instead to increase robustness. But expanding the set of known unknowns doesn't help you deal with the remaining infinite set of unknown unknowns. 7/7
