(2024-01-03) Ford Forget Growth Optimize For Resilience

Paul Ford: Forget Growth. Optimize for Resilience. I cofounded a software company, like a doofus, so I attend a weekly analytics meeting. My cofounder runs “product”; I'm loosely in charge of “the funnel (growth team)... it's not really a funnel, more of a juicer.”

In our analytics meetings, we measure the human juice as it dribbles in: pages visited, sign-ups, actions taken. We talk about how to squeeze more.

They're good meetings. I've done them for years. But this past summer, something felt off.

The summer was very warm. I don't need to tell you, do I?

As the leaves turned, my wilted brain figured it out. Here I was, looking for growth—how to get from 10,000 users to 10,001—while outside the company, people were marching about how it was time to focus on absolutely anything else. I tend to agree with them. Our startup has a small carbon footprint, so we're not the problem in that sense. But was growth the right metric, the only metric, for us to obsess about?

My mind drifted to a book called Lean Logic. It's a big red book. I took it off the shelf and skimmed through it. It's the life's work of a British economist named David Fleming, published after his death in 2010

Fleming believed that growth has natural limits... growth beyond that point is, in his words, a “pathology” and an “affliction.”

The bigger and more productive an economy gets, he argued, the more resources it needs to burn to maintain its own infrastructure. It becomes less and less efficient at keeping any one person clothed, fed, and sheltered. He called this the “intensification paradox”

Inevitably, Fleming believed, growth will turn to degrowth, intensification to deintensification. These are things to prepare for, plan for, and the way to do that is with the missing metric: resilience.

Fleming offers several definitions of resilience

So I began to imagine, in my hypocritical heart, an analytics platform that would measure resilience in those terms

Instead of revenue, it would measure relationships formed, barters fulfilled, products loaned and reused. It would reflect all sorts of non-transactional activities that make a company resilient

In the analytics meeting, we would ask questions like “Is the product cheap enough for everyone?” I even tried to sketch out a resilience funnel

It was an interesting exercise, but what I ended up imagining was basically HR software for Burning Man, which, well, I'm not sure that's the world I want to live in either

The fundamental problem is that the stuff that creates resilience won't ever show up in the analytics.

All of this somewhat guilty running around led me back to the simplest answer: I can't measure resilience.

Which means I have to talk to strangers, politely, about problems they're trying to solve.

I hate this conclusion. I want to push out content and see lines move and make no more small talk. I want my freaking charts.