Optimizing yourself into a corner

Organizations thrive on incremental improvement. They find a stable foundation and then build a feedback loop of relentless improvement.

This leads to great efficiency, higher productivity and more profits. It enables more throughput and builds market share.

Except things change.

Optimized offerings are brittle. When the foundation shifts, all of that incremental improvement breaks into shards.

When the dust settles, the optimized alternative is almost always surpassed by the resilient one.