Robustness Over Performance: What Biology Can Teach Us That Civilization Forgot

A Summary of Nate Hagens' conversation with biologist and biophysicist Olivier Hamant

NOTE: This is not an original piece of writing. It is a respectful summary of The Optimization Trap: Why Too Much Efficiency Makes us Fragile, Nate Hagens’ August 5th conversation with biologist and biophysicist Olivier Hamant, director of the Michael Serres Institute and research director at INRAE on The Great Simplification.

I was so moved by the conversation that I felt compelled to summarize key points for others to easily access. These concepts are of critical salience to narrative, design and strategy as we navigate the Great Turning. Listen to the full episode here. (Or wherever you listen to podcasts.)

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Early in this conversation, Olivier Hamant offers a profound reframe: “Great simplification is a great over-optimization.” Our fragility isn’t a side effect of modern life. It’s the direct and predictable output of a civilization that has spent the last few centuries optimizing for performance while quietly dismantling the buffers, redundancies, and slack that keep living systems alive through unexpected fluctuation.

Hamant has spent his career studying how biological systems survive across deep time — not by being efficient, but by being robust. In this conversation with Nate Hagens (host of The Great Simplification), he lays out why that distinction matters more now than at any point in recent history, as we move, in his words, from an “era of the mean” into an “era of the standard deviation.”

Here are the core ideas.

Performance vs. Robustness

Hamant defines his terms precisely:

• Performance = efficacy (reaching your goal) + efficiency (using the least resources to get there).

• Robustness = the capacity of a system to remain stable and viable despite fluctuation — a tree bending in wind, an ecosystem absorbing drought, a body withstanding illness.

These aren’t opposites exactly — they’re a trade-off, and which one a system optimizes for depends on the safety net available to it. Performance is only viable when there’s an abundance of resources cushioning the risk of failure. Robustness is what emerges when a system has to survive scarcity, unpredictability, and shocks without that cushion.

For most of human history, roughly 300,000 years of Homo sapiens, we lived by the logic of robustness. Cooperation, diversity, redundancy. It was only with Neolithic agricultural surplus, then the Renaissance and colonization, then the discovery of fossil fuels, that we could afford to organize around performance instead. Cheap, abundant energy became the safety net that made hyper-optimization possible — and, Hamant argues, made us dangerously fragile in the process.

He calls what we’ve built a “normal accident,” borrowing from sociologist Charles Perrow’s term for systems so complex and interdependent that failure becomes not just possible, but inevitable.

Evolution Doesn’t Select the Most Efficient, It Selects the Most Adaptable

One of the conversation’s foundational correctives: we’ve collectively misread Darwin. The Origin of Species was never a case for the survival of the most efficient organism — it was a case for the survival of the most adaptable one.

Species that persist across millions of years, sharks, for instance, aren’t efficient. They’re robust. Species that over-specialize (Hamant’s example: orchids co-evolved with a single pollinator) tend to vanish when conditions shift. The lesson scales up: it’s not individual species that survive long-term disruption, but heterogeneous populations that mutually support one another. A monoculture forest bred for drought resistance will still succumb to the first pathogen that finds it. Diversity is a shield.

This is where Hamant’s biology becomes a warning about human systems: our economies increasingly select for narrow specialization and standardization, the very traits that make ecosystems (and, he argues, human institutions) brittle under stress.

Efficiency, Paradoxically, Increases Consumption

Hamant connects the conversation to Jevons Paradox — the well-documented pattern where efficiency gains produce more consumption, not less. (More efficient planes → cheaper flights → more flying, more throughput.) He links this to Norman Borlaug’s “land-sparing” theory where increased crop yields are proposed as a path to spare forests from being cleared, except higher yields create new demand (palm oil, soy) that drive deforestation anyway.

Notably, he sees rudimentary versions of this dynamic even outside human economies (birds overfeeding on abundant bread in a park), but he’s careful to note it never approaches the scale or complexity of the human rebound effect. Because we alone manufacture the demand that follows the efficiency gain.

4 Determinants For Robustness

Rather than leave “robustness” abstract, Hamant offers a practical framework to scaffold robust systems in your community and to and stress-test any policy, project, or decision:

1. Redundancy: There must be a plan B, C, D — real alternatives, not a single optimized path.

2. Heterogeneity: Plan Bs must be genuinely different from plan A, not repetitions of the same idea.

3. Link to the living: Solutions rely on local life, water, sand, biomass — not solely on imported minerals.

4. Link to the territory: Deep social, economic and material rooting in a specific place.

These are simultaneously principles of design and domains to explore a diagnostic tools to stress test the robustness of your business, household or community. To do a stress test: model a severe shock — oil at 10x its current price, six months with no internet, etc. — and see what breaks. This map of fragility tells you where robustness needs to be developed next.

Improvisation Rather Than Control

Asked what a psychologically robust person looks like, Hamant doesn’t reach for a resilience framework, he points towards improvisation. While a classically trained musician founders without sheet music, a jazz musician flows with the ongoing changes of the players around him.

“Jazz is robust... not the marching band. Because that’s not really jazz. Real jazz is improv.”

This becomes a broader metaphor for how to relate to an increasingly unpredictable century: not gripping tighter, but building the kind of slack and trust that lets you play with what comes rather than being derailed by it. He extends this into concrete civic examples — repair cafés, multi-use public spaces (the way sidewalks became waiting rooms and plazas became vaccination sites during COVID) — as small, real seeds of robustness already present in most communities, simply underused and under-recognized.

Note: I am going to redouble practicing my dance and comedy improv skills!

Robustness Is a Space, Not a Bounce-Back

Hamant is precise about distinguishing robustness from two adjacent ideas he considers weaker:

• Resilience implies you fall and then bounce back. It’s reactive, and, as in Japan’s post-Fukushima “resilience” messaging encouraging radiation exposure tolerance, it can be quietly co-opted to normalize harm.

• Antifragility (Nassim Taleb’s term) implies you fall and come back stronger. This, taken to its logical end, means you need failure in order to grow. Hamant calls this a potentially dystopian model: a student shouldn’t need to fail in order to learn.

Robustness, by contrast, is a space of response to variability that you inhabit and expand. It’s not a cycle of collapse and recovery, but the capacity to oscillate within a wide, sustainable range without ever needing to fall at all.

A Third Path Between Growth and Degrowth

Perhaps the conversation’s most consequential claim: robustness offers something distinct from both the “grow the economy” and “degrowth” camps. It reframes the underlying diagnosis. The core problem isn’t climate, pollution, or energy scarcity individually. Those are downstream symptoms. The root cause is ecological overshoot eroding the planet’s buffers, which is what’s driving unpredictability across every system at once.

If that diagnosis is right, the response isn’t just “use less,” it’s building systems (agroecology instead of industrial monoculture, sharing economies instead of production economies, repairable and locally-rooted technologies and supply chains) that are engineered from the ground up to absorb shocks rather than merely reduce throughput.

Hamant is careful to note this doesn’t mean rejecting the technological competence built up over the last century. It means redirecting it toward durability, repairability, and local sovereignty rather than pure output.

Change From the Periphery

Hamant doesn’t expect robustness to be adopted top-down. He points instead to what he calls an “active minority” strategy, borrowed loosely from Sun Tzu: gather a small, genuinely heterogeneous group of allies — not people who already agree with each other, but a CEO, a baker, someone unhoused, people from wildly different walks of life — united on this one point. That kind of visibly diverse coalition is much harder for a majority to dismiss than a single voice, however loud.

He draws a biological parallel: in a flock of birds shifting direction mid-flight, it’s the birds at the periphery, not the center, that guide the turn. Change moves from the edges inward, not the reverse.

He points to early, real-world traction: robustness-focused learning communities spreading across the Francophone world; French cities (Lyon, Rennes) beginning to fold robustness into civic decision-making criteria; a coalition of 6,000 French CEOs (Le Centre des Jeunes Dirigeants) formally shifting their stated priority from “global performance” to robustness this year.

On AI

Asked directly about artificial intelligence, Hamant is measured but pointed. AI, as currently built and deployed, is a performance technology almost by definition. And worse, it’s structurally biased toward the mean. Its outputs are correlational, drawn toward whatever is most statistically common. In a world entering an era of standard deviation rather than mean, that’s close to the opposite of what adaptability requires.

His one proposed reframe: AI could serve robustness if it were deliberately built to be less efficient — requiring human verification and engagement after the fact, functioning as a genuine collaborator that prompts new questions rather than replacing the thinking entirely.

Three Lessons From a Billion Years of Life

Near the end of the conversation, Hagens asks the question the whole episode has been building toward: if non-human life has been quietly teaching us something for hundreds of millions of years, what is it? Hamant answers with three principles.

1. Circularity. In living systems, nothing is wasted. Everything is a gift that feeds something else back into the system. Humans are, in Hamant’s words, the only species that has invented non-circular systems (nuclear waste being the starkest example). A genuinely circular bioeconomy would mean designing objects and processes that actively feed ecosystems rather than merely avoiding harm to them.

2. Cooperation. When resources are scarce and conditions are unpredictable, living beings cooperate. Symbiosis, not competition, is the dominant strategy across most of Earth’s ecosystems. Humans already know this instinctively: it’s why people cooperate spontaneously after disasters. Competition has its place (Hamant compares it to a firefighter at the peak of a blaze) but it should be the exception, not the operating system. The rest of the time, cooperation is what builds the reserve capacity a system draws on during the crisis.

3. Robustness. Though listed third, Hamant calls this the foundational principle. Robustness built in opposition to performance is what allows circularity and cooperation to actually hold up over time rather than collapsing under the first serious shock.

Together, he argues, these three principles aren’t just a survival strategy, they’re a more joyful way to live. Life organized around circularity, cooperation, and robustness isn’t the grim, sacrificial vision degrowth often gets stereotyped as. It’s fuller, more social, and less narrow than a life organized entirely around efficiency.

Closing Note

Asked what he cares most about in the world, Olivier replies, “Life education.” Speaking to companies and schools, he says “life is often absent; the machine is present.”

He invites you to expose yourself to life — to bees, plants, elements. Get outside. “Then you will develop an emotional link to Life, and then maybe you’ll have a different sense.”

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Thank you to Nate Hagens and Olivier Hamant and The Great Simplification! Hamant’s short book,*Antidote to the Cult of Performance*, is available as a free PDF in English.