Member-only story
The Importance Of Redundancy In Organizations
Every single system in the universe needs redundancy in order to survive. From mechanical systems to biological ones, redundancy guarantees their continuity.
Just look around the natural world, what seems a wasteful process of a species providing thousands of redundant offspring is in fact redundancy in action in order to ensure the survival of that species.
The same principle applies to technology, a plane would be unsafe to fly if it didn’t have many redundancies built into it.
How can we build redundancy into an organization?
There are only two ways to build redundancy into any organization:
- Restrictively (By having more people with the same skills -redundancy of ‘parts’).
- Enhancively (By having less people with more skills -redundancy of functions).
In a restrictive hierarchy, people have been deprived of the ability to think and choose, as is the case in all bureaucracies. Hence, all the pathological implications we are all too familiar with, namely, lack of leadership, lack of responsibility, lack of collaboration, lack of innovation, lack of…
