Sustainability Bites

When building a toolbox, it pays not to put all your eggs in one basket. It’s a basic rule of complex systems science and a cautionary tale for every optimizing handyman (or woman). It’s also a good rule to keep in mind if you believe efficiency will solve the challenge of sustainability.

Many years ago I put together the perfect toolbox. Well, nothing is perfect of course, but this collection of tools came pretty close to filling all my maintenance needs around the house. And it had taken me over a decade to put together.

Goldilocks optimisation

Anyone who has purchased a pre-packed toolbox from the local hardware store will know that though they come with many pieces and look nice, when it comes to functionality, they usually have heaps of things you don’t need while seeming to miss many of the items you must have to get the job done. (And the boxes are usually made out of fragile plastic.)

That’s to be expected given the nature of handyman repairs around the house. Each job requires a different set of tools and fasteners (nails, screws and bolts) and each house and handyman (or handywoman) have their own way of doing things. Context is everything.

Over time, largely through trial and error, you figure out which tools will cover most of the jobs required – the basics being a hammer, pliers, wire cutters, several screwdrivers and spanners, chisel and saw – and which screws and bolts and so forth will meet most needs.

And, of course, you need a sturdy container – the toolbox itself – that neatly stores them away so they’re all accessible quickly, with lots of little compartments for those nails and screws and oddments that you’ve found so useful over time (like those little wedges of wood you’ve found so handy for propping things up).

And the box – the container that carries all these tools and bits – can’t be too big because then it’s a pain to lug around.

We’re talking Goldilocks optimisation here – not too big, not too small, not too complicated – everything just right.

As I said, you figure out what this means over time, slowly building up a collection of the essential tools and bits, neatly compartmentalised in a solid but conveniently sized container. It took me over ten years to build my ‘perfect’ toolbox, which was neatly stored out in the garden shed – available at a moment’s notice for whatever repair or job I had on.

Gone in a flash

I’d show you a picture of my perfect toolbox but less than month after I’d completed it my shed was broken into and the box was stolen, along with a range of power tools stored alongside it.

I was devastated. Sure, I could replace the tools but all those bits and bobs and screws and bolts that I had carefully selected over time would take a similar length of time to reassemble. And what’s to say I wouldn’t lose my new box to the next burglar – home break ins are common in my suburb.

So, what did I do? I gave up on the idea of ‘perfection’, of Goldilocks optimisation, and switched tracks to a strategy of distributed redundancy (though that description is more of a post hoc rationalisation of what followed rather than a carefully thought through strategy).

What it actually meant was that I started accruing several caches of tools in a variety of places in and around the house, each with the bits and pieces relevant to the repair job I was doing near that space.

Rather than building one excellent toolbox, I had multiple copies of some tools appearing in different caches. Different selections of screwdrivers, different sized hammers and multiple pliers, for example, can now be found in several locations around the house. I don’t really worry what’s where because if I can’t find what I need in one set, I’ll simply move to the next.

Yes – I hear the voices of handypeople saying – this is not very efficient, and some might judge it as quite suboptimal – but no robber is going to going to get all of my tools, and I’ve stopped worrying about assembling that perfect collection. What’s more, I usually have some tool or other that will suit most of my needs and I never have travel far to find it.

Eggs and response diversity

So, I have redundancy in the tools available to me, and the tool resource is distributed over several locations. No tool cache is perfect but with a bit of time I can usually get the job done. It’s sub optimal in the sense that it might take a little longer to get the job done, but it’s more resilient to disturbances (like a burglary) and, ultimately, it’s quite a flexible solution.

All of which is a (real life) parable illustrating the saying ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket’. And while this example is relatively trivial, upscale the lesson and it has real world implications for our culture and its remorseless drive for efficiency and optimisation.

Listen to the productivity hawks who have the ear of governments everywhere and you’ll hear them constantly telling us that rather than doing things in multiple ways we should have a strict focus on doing things the most efficient way and, in consequence, stop investing in less efficient approaches. Redundancies are removed from the system, profits rise but the system loses the diversity of ways it once did things. This is referred to as a loss of response diversity and it leads to a system losing its ability to absorb disturbances, its resilience.

Nations outsource manufacturing to countries where labour is cheap and environmental protections are low. Profits are higher but the outsourcing nation loses the capacity (skills and infrastructure) that they once possessed making them less flexible and more vulnerable in a rapidly changing world.

Profit up, flexibility down

‘Just in time’ processes (manufacturing, inventory, provisioning and so forth) have grown enormously in recent years as companies have discovered they can make big savings by eliminating warehouses and shorten their supply lines. Profit goes up but flexibility goes down because the system has to work optimally or it falls over.

By focusing on efficiency and maximising profitability the response diversity of these companies (and if you go up in scale – countries) is reduced. They can operate at higher levels of productivity and profit but in a decreasing set of conditions. And when a disturbance hits the system, rather than switching to alternative ways of doing things and adapting, the system can fall over.

Consider how increases in efficiency in world trade has reduced the flexibility of how we trade making it more vulnerable to disturbance. Much of that efficiency rests on bigger ships operating on set trade routes operating out of massive container terminals. Costs per unit traded go down but the system is vulnerable to disturbances shutting down those trade routes, which is exactly what happened when the giant container ship the Ever Green, one of the largest in the world, ran aground in the Suez Canal in 2021 closing the canal for six days and blocking the transit of hundreds of ships. Because of a lack of alternative routes and modes of transport (a lack of response diversity), billions of dollars of trade were lost during the stoppage.

Or, going up scale a bit, consider the consequences of raising efficiency on our main food sources. Over the past half century our focus on making the production of a small handful of crops as efficient as possible has led to enormous leaps in productivity. However, this has been at the expense of the diversity of our food crops that has supported humanity over longer periods, each suited to different cultures, landscapes and growing conditions. Moreover, local varieties of the big four (maize, wheat, rice and barley) are also being lost as a smaller number of high-yielding varieties are increasingly being used in highly controlled systems of industrialized agriculture. Diversity is sacrificed for productivity, response diversity is lost and our food systems become increasingly vulnerable to climate change, crop failure, disease and disruptions in trade.

So how do you prioritise response diversity when developing policy? When should you be worried about putting too many eggs in one policy basket? Brian Walker and colleagues recently listed a set of guiding principles that policy makers should keep in mind when considering response diversity (see Table 1, from Walker et al, 2022, this paper was also the source of the Ever Green and crop case studies discussed above).

A better tool box?

So, next time you decide to build a toolbox for your home or design a food system to feed humanity, be careful aiming for perfection via the pathway of efficiency. You might be optimal for a little while, but then the world turns and you’ll discover you’ve naively placed all your eggs in one basket.

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