Robustness: where this concept comes from
A notion from biology
The thread running through our courses is borrowed from the biologist Olivier Hamant, research director at INRAE, based at the École normale supérieure de Lyon, where he heads the Institut Michel Serres.
Drawing on the observation of plants and living systems more broadly, he defines robustness as the ability to keep a system stable despite fluctuations. He distinguishes it from performance, which seeks to reach a goal with as few resources as possible.
Performance or robustness
According to Olivier Hamant, the pursuit of performance at all costs makes systems fragile: an optimised system has no reserves left and breaks at the first unexpected event.
Living systems, by contrast, are not optimal. They are redundant, heterogeneous, often slow, sometimes inconsistent. That is precisely what allows them to hold up in a changing environment.
What we take from it for organisations
Our courses apply this idea to the life of businesses and organisations: keeping margins where the unexpected would cost the most, making sure no task depends on a single person or a single tool, being able to carry on in degraded mode rather than stopping.
This is not praise of slowness or waste: it is a costed choice of what to protect and what one accepts to leave fragile.
Further reading (in French)
Olivier Hamant, « Antidote au culte de la performance. La robustesse du vivant », Gallimard, Tracts series, 2023.
Olivier Hamant, « La troisième voie du vivant », Odile Jacob, 2022.
Ad Cognita has no connection with Olivier Hamant or the institutions mentioned. This page presents his thinking as we understand and apply it; it commits only us.