Fleming believed that growth had natural limits. Things grow to maturity—children into adults, saplings into trees, startups into full-fledged companies—but growth beyond that point is, in his words, “pathology” and “suffering.” The larger and more productive an economy becomes, he argues, the more resources it must expend to maintain its own infrastructure. It is becoming less and less effective at keeping every single person clothed, fed and sheltered. He called this the “paradox of intensification”: the harder everyone works to make the GDP line move up, the harder everyone must work to make the GDP line move up. Inevitably, Fleming believes, growth will turn into degrowth, intensification into de-intensification. These are things you need to prepare for, plan for, and the way to do that is with the missing metric: resilience.
Fleming offers several definitions of resilience, the shortest of which is “the ability of a system to cope with a shock”. He describes two types: preemptive resilience, which helps you maintain an existing state despite shocks, and resilient recovery resilience, which helps you quickly adapt to a new state after the shock. Growth won’t help you with resilience, Fleming argues. Only the community will. It’s big in the “informal economy”—think Craigslist and Buy Nothing, not Amazon. People helping people.
So I began to imagine, in my hypocritical heart, an analytics platform that would measure resilience in this way. Because the growth was too high, notifications will be triggered to your phone: Slower! Stop selling! Instead of revenue, it will measure relationships created, barters made, products borrowed and reused. This will reflect all kinds of non-transactional activities that make a company sustainable: Is the sales team doing enough yoga? Do office dogs have enough pets? In the analysis meeting, we’ll ask questions like, “Is the product cheap enough for everyone?” I’ve even tried to draw a sustainability funnel where the juice that drips down is people checking out their neighbors. It was an interesting exercise, but what I ended up envisioning was basically HR software for Burning Man, which, well, I’m not sure that’s the world I want to live in either. If you come up with a good sustainability funnel, let me know. Such a product would do very poorly in the market (assuming you can even measure that).
The main problem is that the things that create resilience will never show up in the analytics. Let’s say you’re building a chat app. If people are talking more with your app, that’s a good thing, right? It’s a community! But the really good number, from a sustainability perspective, is how often they leave the app and meet in person to discuss things. Because it will result in someone coming to the house with lasagna when someone else has Covid, or someone giving someone’s kid an old acoustic guitar from the attic in exchange for, I don’t know, a beehive. The whole Earth things. You know how it goes.
All this somewhat guilt-ridden running brought me back to the simplest answer: I can’t measure resilience. I mean, sure, I could understand a bunch of vague, abstract statistics and make statements. God knows I’ve done a lot of this before. But there’s really no metric that can capture it. Which means I have to talk to strangers, politely, about the problems they’re trying to solve.
I hate this conclusion. I want to push content and see the lines move and no more talk. I want my fucking leaderboards. That’s why I like the technique. Benchmarks, CPU speeds, hard drive sizes, bandwidth, users, point releases, revenue. I love it when the number goes up. It is almost impossible to imagine a world in which this is not the case. Or rather it was.
This article appears in the November 2023 issue. Subscribe now.
