There is an asymmetry at the heart of overoptimisation that is easy to miss until it is too late.
When a system narrows — when the capability deemed redundant gets cut, when the knowledge that was not captured in the metrics retires with the people who held it — that is not a reversible decision. The capability does not sit waiting to be restored. It dissolves.
The philosopher Michael Polanyi described this kind of knowledge as tacit: we know more than we can tell. It exists in practice, in relationships, in the accumulated understanding of why things were done a certain way and what happened when they were not. It was never fully written down, because it did not need to be. When the practitioners leave, the knowledge goes with them. What remains is the documented procedure — which is the part that was already legible, not the part that was actually load-bearing.
The UK nuclear industry is a clear example. Sizewell B, completed in 1995, was the last nuclear power station built in Britain. For the following twenty-five years, no new plant was started. The specialist engineering expertise, the supply chain knowledge, the regulatory experience of managing live construction — all of it atrophied. When Hinkley Point C finally began, the capability had to be largely rebuilt from overseas. The costs and delays that followed are partly a consequence of that gap. The knowledge was not waiting to be retrieved. It had retired, dispersed, and dissolved.
This is what makes productive collapse genuinely dangerous rather than merely awkward. The organisation is not just performing against the wrong measures. It is quietly consuming the reserves it would need to respond when conditions change — and consuming them in a way that looks, from inside, like sensible management.
The same pattern appears wherever technical expertise is allowed to atrophy through underinvestment or neglect: in specialist manufacturing, in public health infrastructure, in the ecological knowledge held by farming communities before industrial methods displaced it. The moment of reckoning arrives as a shock because the degradation was invisible until something external forced the gap into view. By then, the capacity that would have allowed a different response is gone.
This is the argument for examining fundamentals before the crisis, not during it. Once the gap becomes visible, the options have already narrowed.
Related
- Overoptimisation — the mechanism that makes the removal feel rational at each step
- Productive collapse — the failure mode this feeds: performing well by internal measures while losing the underlying capacity
- Separated knowledge — a related dynamic: the knowledge exists in the system but cannot reach the people with authority to act on it
- The evidence is not subtle — the broader case that current trajectories are producing outcomes the frame cannot account for
- From optimised to resilient — the direction of travel out of this dynamic
- The suppression of finitude — the professional and institutional tendency to exclude awareness of genuine limits; the dissolution of capability is what this suppression produces in practice