The more unstable the world becomes, the more we try to optimize our businesses, supply chains, and systems. Yet this relentless pursuit of performance is precisely what reduces our ability to adapt when conditions change.
Anthropologist Elman Service’s “Law of Evolutionary Potential” captures this paradox. The more specialized, efficient, and perfectly adapted a society becomes to a given context, the less adaptive potential it retains when that context shifts.
Our current economic trajectory is eroding that evolutionary potential. We keep increasing specialization, concentrating capabilities, stretching value chains, and creating dependencies that turn every efficiency gain into a new vulnerability.
The digitization of the economy and the massive deployment of artificial intelligence illustrate this perfectly. Behind the performance gains lies growing dependence on energy, metals, digital infrastructure, and a handful of technologies controlled by a few large corporations and concentrated in strategically sensitive regions.
We are creating technological and geographic concentration at the very moment the world is becoming more unstable. The more sophisticated and specialized our systems become, the faster an energy, geopolitical, material, or technological disruption can spread across the entire economy.
The same logic shapes our investment decisions. In Quebec, hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds have been committed to major private projects presented as essential engines of our economic future, only for several to expose vulnerabilities that were entirely foreseeable to anyone taking the metacrisis seriously.
Those resources could have strengthened the robustness of our businesses, municipalities, and communities. Instead, we concentrated them in a handful of specialized bets built on growth, technology, and assumptions of stability that increasingly fail to match the real world.
This bias has shaped economic development since the First Industrial Revolution. Infinite growth, techno-solutionism, specialization, long global value chains, maximum performance, and optimization have gradually displaced diversity, redundancy, regionalization, and robustness.
Robustness requires a different logic. It means reducing dependencies, diversifying capabilities, preserving room to maneuver, regionalizing parts of value chains, and accepting lower performance today to preserve our ability to act tomorrow.
It also means giving up the obsession with optimizing everything. A system with no excess capacity, no redundancy, no alternatives, and no spare resources looks highly efficient as long as everything works, then becomes extremely fragile the moment conditions change.
The 21st century is already rewarding businesses and communities that can absorb shocks rather than those squeezing the last point of performance from systems running at maximum tension. Robustness is becoming a core economic strategy in a world that is more constrained, unstable, and unpredictable.
And we are only at the beginning of this transformation. Economic, commercial, and geopolitical rules are already being rewritten by actors determined to protect their interests, and those who keep optimizing for yesterday’s world will soon discover that they perfected their performance for a game that no longer exists.
