Adaptability and Efficiency

I've been working on this series of ink drawings. I'll post more as they are completed.

If you are racing against a competitor in a well-defined market, efficiency will be one of the contested edges. Your ability to deliver the same services or products but with slightly lower overhead or deliver time will give you the marginal edge that tips the scale in your favour.

The problem with this in terms of adaptability, however, is that those increasingly small margins of efficiency yield lower and lower returns for energy invested. The diminishing returns means that you may fight desparately for that small percentage, tuning your systems, cutting input costs at every step, looking for lower labour costs, and so on.

In terms of adaptability - your organizations capacity to change itself to meet the demands of a changing environment - frantic surges toward narrowing returns often yields a hyper specialised system that is very vulnerable to external shocks. Efficiency markers are high, adaptability markers are low. If you are fortunate and the influences that press your business are minor, the efficiency game will yield enough return to make that strategy seem viable. But if conditions change (a more likely scenario than market stability) you will find that your ability to respond will not be sufficient to meet the demands that are required to survive.

Finding those key markers that indicate adaptability - and the corresponding resilience - are important for any enterprise that is interested in more than short-term survival.