When Agile becomes Fragile

Something darkly tragic is that we're facing a problem in our industrialized UK food chain, a significant contributor to climate change because we're short of CO2.

There is an inevitability that when we build increasingly complex supply chains and rely on a notion of "agility" to deal with problems that at some point, agile becomes fragile. Looked at systemically and without the distorting lens of short term profit and system gaming, the challenges presented by the complexity of what we have created is clear. It doesn't even have to be with hindsight. Donella Meadows, James Lovelock, Ernst Schumacher and many others were flagging this half a century ago. Yet here we are, a decade after the last "Too Big To Fail" banking crisis, with a TBTF 2.0 Energy crisis.

We will, of course, finagle our way through this for a while with the application of liberal public funds and, no doubt, the generation of some huge opportunist profits. Still, it's difficult to see how we go further without asking …