Is resilience and success masking the problems you need to fix?
This article explores how human adaptability to poorly functioning systems introduces a brittleness, which they call the Brittle Threshold.
Shared under an open access licence.
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Extracts:
• “What happens when a system keeps working—not because it is well-designed but because people keep absorbing the strain?”
• “Adaptation is indispensable in health care … [and] adaptive actions are routinely cited as evidence of competence, flexibility and system efficiency”
• “When work continues under pressure, adaptation is taken as confirmation that coping is sufficient”
• But some have “cautioned that treating continued functioning as evidence of sufficient coping risks obscuring the strain that sustains it”
• They propose Brittle Threshold, being the zone “which adaptation remains effective yet increasingly fragile. It is not a moment of failure but a condition of narrowing margin”
• And while it’s exact location is unknown in the moment, usually until something bad happens, “What can be observed are the signals of diminishing capacity that indicate increasing proximity to that limit”
• “adaptation is understood as a finite capacity that can be stretched and saturated, rather than as a reserve that can be drawn on indefinitely”
• “Systems can look fine precisely because they are not fine”
• “local adaptive actions that preserve performance at one level may shift strain elsewhere, increasing coordination burden, workload, or vulnerability in adjacent or higher-level systems”
• Thus “adaptation may be locally effective while creating brittleness across the broader system”
• During COVID, the author observed “implosive adaptation”, being how teams navigated disruption on the ground; it was a “reality check, a scramble, and a pivot”
• And while they “ adapted, but it was an implosion, it was not a successful adaptation”
• Problematically in complex, strained systems, performance “increasingly relied on a small number of individuals who could flex across boundaries, making the system both effective and fragile”
• In all, “For leaders, [Brittle threshold] shifts attention from outcomes alone to the mechanisms producing those outcomes”
• “A service may continue meeting targets, a team may continue delivering care and a training programme may continue functioning effectively while increasingly relying on a handful of people to bridge gaps and absorb work that formally belongs elsewhere in the system”
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