Thinking tool: Accept redundancy
Redundant or duplicate work is obviously always bad, right?
No.
In fact, there are two good reasons to accept redundancy.
Reason 1: Coordination is expensive
Sometimes it's easier to duplicate work than it is to coordinate to avoid it. This is because:
- Context gathering is hard. Getting full state on what everyone is doing in a large organisation is difficult. And of course, getting full state on everyone in the world, ever, is also pretty challenging.
- Convincing others is hard. Once you have a good state of the world and you figured out a good plan, it's also a lot of work to communicate this context and agree on this plan with others. And often there is a lot of hard-to-communicate nuance, or future change that is hard to predict.
- Doing the work can be cheap. Sometimes just doing the thing can take less time than arguing or theorising about it. For coding tasks, this is more true than ever as AI tooling, helpful high-level open-source frameworks, and underlying infrastructure like cloud services continue to get better.
(People with a rudimentary understanding of microeconomics often forget the costs of the first two. Basic economics assumes an efficient market with perfect information and rational actors - but this is far from the world we live in! This is even more true at a local scale, for example within an organisation, where there might just be a couple of teams doing a thing, with maybe only a couple internal customers, instead of millions of "market participants".)
Reason 2: Redundancy can increase chance of success
For an important, uncertain outcome, multiple independent shots on target are worth it.
Redundancy was named as one of the factors in replicating the success of Operation Warp Speed, the US Government's partnership to rapidly produce COVID-19 vaccines. As Jacob Robertson and Alice Wu explain in a blog for The Federation of American Scientists:
Redundancy was incorporated in two dimensions: three different vaccine platforms and two separate candidates.
The manufacturing strategy also included redundancy, as several companies were awarded contracts to produce needles and syringes. Diversifying sources for common vaccination supplies reduced the overall risk of failure at each node in the supply chain.
Related concepts
This is part of my thinking tools series. Also consider:
- Musk's 5 step design process encourages questioning requirements and deleting unnecessary parts or processes. This runs counter to accepting redundancy - in practice, you can find a balance where you only accept redundancy where it is truly the most effective way to achieve your goals