Organisations spend decades chasing efficiency: fewer handoffs, standardised processes, central governance. And yet the same measures that squeeze waste out of operations can also remove the very capacity you need to innovate. That tension—what Cris Beswick calls the Brittleness Paradox—is one of the clearest reasons product organisations break before they can build the future. I read Cris’s piece and it struck a deep chord with my experience leading product and technology teams across telecoms, travel and energy: efficiency without adaptability is a false economy.
Why efficiency becomes organisational brittle
There are three common ways optimisation turns into brittleness.
- Over-constraint of teams. When processes and metrics prioritise short-term throughput, teams become task factories rather than learning engines. Autonomy dies under too many approvals and too rigid a definition of success.
- Single-purpose architectures. Highly optimised systems often minimise redundancy and generality. That’s great for cost-per-transaction—but disastrous when you need to pivot or experiment.
- Budget models that reward delivery, not discovery. Funding tied to projects and outputs starves the exploratory work that produces durable, differentiated products.
These dynamics are well described in The Brittleness Paradox, and they echo familiar industry failures: think of firms that trimmed options until disruption found them without a spare lever to pull.
Three concrete moves to preserve adaptability
Leaders need practical countermeasures. Here are three that product and technology leaders can implement today.
1. Fund the product, not just the project
Move away from one-off, output-driven budgets and create multi-year product funding with explicit allocation for discovery. That keeps teams accountable for outcomes while protecting the runway to experiment. This isn’t new advice—others have argued it before—but it remains the single most effective structural change to prevent brittleness. A funded product can fail fast, learn, and reallocate without begging for permission at every turn.
2. Create low-friction experiment plumbing
Technical and organisational friction kills learning. Invest in platforms, APIs and developer experience that let teams run experiments safely and cheaply. Platform teams should be judged on reducing delivery and validation time, not just uptime. When you remove deployment and test friction, exploration becomes routine rather than exceptional.
3. Protect early-stage ideas from the operational machine
Organisational policies should include a ‘safe harbour’ for nascent products: lean governance, lightweight KPIs and a short feedback loop to commercial or user validation. Think of incubation as insurance: you pay a small premium to maintain options in an uncertain future. Successful organisations maintain a deliberately porous barrier between exploitation (core, efficient business) and exploration (new bets).
Leadership behaviours that make these changes stick
Structural changes fail without consistent leadership signals.
- Celebrate learning metrics. Reward teams for validated learning—customer interviews, experiments run, hypotheses tested—alongside delivery metrics.
- Accept reversible failure. Make it safe to stop a shiny project that isn’t delivering. Termination should be a sign of healthy decision-making, not a career hazard.
- Guard the product runway. As a leader, protect small pools of discretionary funding and capacity specifically for discovery. Make those budgets visible and recurring.
Real-world lessons
Look at Netflix’s cultural emphasis on context over control: the organisation deliberately trusts small, empowered teams to make decisions close to the customer. That decentralised capability made it possible for Netflix to pivot repeatedly—from DVD rental to streaming to original content—without being hamstrung by centralised processes. Their approach is a practical antidote to brittleness: decentralised decision-making plus strong shared guardrails.
By contrast, many legacy incumbents suffer the classic trap: optimised supply chains, central approvals and tight budgets—for good reason in stable times—leave them unable to respond swiftly when markets change. The Blockbuster-Netflix story remains a useful cautionary tale: streamlining the core delivered short-term efficiency but removed options for transformation.
Practical checklist for product leaders
- Audit governance: identify approval steps that block experiments and trim them.
- Allocate 10–20% of product engineering capacity to discovery and platform improvements that reduce friction.
- Define funding gates that allow small-scale bets to run for a fixed period with simple success criteria.
- Measure both outcome and learning metrics and make them visible at executive level.
These are not silver bullets. But they are practical, measurable changes that reduce brittleness without sacrificing the legitimate operational demands of running a business.
Where this leads us
Efficiency and adaptability are not enemies—they are complementary capabilities that must be deliberately balanced. The trick is institutional: design funding, governance and platform investments so teams can respond to change while keeping the lights on. If you strip out slack and flexibility in the name of efficiency, you may win the quarter but lose the future.
This post draws on The Brittleness Paradox by Cris Beswick. Read it if you want the original framing; use the checklist above if you want to start fixing brittleness now.
If you lead product or technology, here’s a simple next step: run a 90-minute diagnostic with your leadership team this month. Map one critical approval, one funding rule and one engineering friction that, if removed, would materially increase your organisation’s capacity to invent. Do that work and you’ll be protecting options—the single most valuable asset in an uncertain market.
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