As organizations and individuals increasingly prioritize performance and efficiency, a new line of inquiry from biologist Olivier Hamant suggests a counterintuitive path to resilience: embracing imperfection.HamantS research, initially focused on the surprising robustness of floral diversity, posits that systems allowing for inconsistency and redundancy are better equipped to adapt to change than those relentlessly optimized for peak output. This concept, explored in his forthcoming book The Robust Enterprise, challenges conventional wisdom and offers a novel perspective on sustainability, leadership, and even geopolitics.
Biologist Olivier Hamant stumbled upon a fascinating paradox while studying flower biology in 2010: how can flowers on the same tree be both similar and unique, while still successfully reproducing? His research revealed that a flower’s resemblance isn’t solely determined by its genetic code, but by the very *process* of its creation. It’s the initial differences – variations in timing and size – that ultimately lead to “encounters” between flowers, resulting in a shared likeness. Hamant’s discovery pointed to a key ingredient for resilience: heterogeneity, the friction that allows life to flourish. He then applied this principle of robustness to other aspects of the natural world, including slowness, inconsistency, and redundancy.
The principle of robustness, Hamant argues, is the opposite of striving for peak performance. Observing the natural world, he found that all systems function with a degree of inefficiency – they aren’t perfectly effective or efficient. This imperfection, however, is precisely what allows them to endure, to adapt to the fluctuations of their environment. Hamant invites us to apply this principle to our own lives and organizations.
How Plants Teach Us the Art of “Underperformance”
Table of Contents
Why are plants green, rather than black like solar panels? This seemingly simple question, Hamant explains, reveals a fundamental secret of life. If plants were black, they would absorb all sunlight, maximizing energy efficiency. But their green hue means they only capture red and blue light, reflecting green – a massive “waste” of resources.
This apparent waste is actually a brilliant survival strategy. Photosynthesis, the fundamental process of life on Earth, perfectly embodies this logic of robustness. “There are a lot of redundancies, there’s an inconsistent enzyme, Rubisco, which fixes carbon, but also oxygen, it’s just a complete mess,” the researcher jokes. This seeming inefficiency allows plants to withstand fluctuations, resist light spikes, and adapt to daily and seasonal changes.
The observation of flowers sparked this line of thinking. How does a flower maintain a recognizable shape in a constantly changing environment? Unlike a piece of furniture assembled from precise instructions – an “Ikea cabinet,” as Hamant puts it – each flower is unique at the cellular level, “like a snowflake.” Growing cells harness their heterogeneity to create mechanical conflicts rich in information, allowing the organ to understand its state and adjust its form. Diversity, then, becomes the key to stability.
The Deadly Trap of Overoptimization
The pursuit of performance isn’t just ineffective in the long run – it’s actively destructive. Hamant recalls the modern definition of performance, distorted by management controllers: “the sum of efficiency and effectiveness,” achieving a goal with the fewest possible resources. What was originally “the art of doing things well” has transformed into a mechanical logic where “good has become well-regulated.”
In competitive sports, this trend reaches dramatic heights. Doping is the most glaring example: “When you play competitive sports, you only see one goal to achieve, even if it means destroying everything else, including your body,” the biologist observes. He cites Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Focusing solely on performance turns sport into a machine for breaking individuals.
But perhaps the lessons of robustness are most urgently needed in geopolitics. Hamant references the testimony of British diplomat Rory Stewart, detailing the 2003 occupation of Iraq. While Anglo-American forces attempted to control everything, creating insecurity and chaos, the Italians “stayed in their barracks,” adopting an approach of underperformance that proved far more peaceful. Faced with the “aficionados of performance” – Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, and others – the researcher is unequivocal: “It only works in a stable world with abundant resources. A parasite in a world becoming fluctuating with chronic resource shortages falls.” A prediction that feels increasingly prescient given current events in Venezuela and global authoritarian trends.
Robustness as a Political Project
Far from being a purely descriptive concept, robustness can become a genuine political program. For Hamant, this begins with a rehabilitation of inconsistency: “Dialogue is about singing inconsistencies, they are fruitful disagreements,” he says, referencing Patrick Viveret. Citizen assemblies on climate change have provided proof: 150 randomly selected people, including even climate change deniers, produced proposals more ambitious than those of experts. The diversity of viewpoints, far from paralyzing action, strengthens it.
The researcher also advocates for a renewed reading of Darwin, too often reduced to “survival of the fittest.” In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin uses the word “sympathy” 70 times and describes numerous cases of cooperation, from snails helping each other to supportive behaviors. “We kind of missed that with Darwin, we just took what suited us during the industrial revolution,” the biologist laments. Reclaiming this more nuanced reading is to restore evolution’s true complexity, which is as much about cooperation as it is about competition.
At the local level, encouraging signs are emerging. Unlike national and supranational governments, “more territorial policies live in the territory with effectuation, and in fact it doesn’t work, performance.” Local authorities, confronted daily with the complexity of reality, are rediscovering the virtues of robustness. Territorial climate conventions are spreading, proving that other paths are possible.
Faced with the extreme polarization of early 2026, Olivier Hamant neither succumbs to pessimism nor naive optimism. He simply observes that overoptimized systems “break,” noting a form of “cosmic justice.” And, most importantly, he reminds us of this essential phrase: “A falling tree makes more noise than a growing forest. We must not forget the forest that is growing.” An invitation to focus our attention on the alternatives that are quietly germinating, away from the media frenzy, and which may already be shaping the world of tomorrow.
To learn more, listen to the program…
Recommended Reading
Further Reading:
- The Robust Enterprise: An Alternative to Performance, Olivier Hamant, Olivier Charbonnier and Sandra Enlart. Odile Jacob, February 2025
- Of Incoherence: Political Philosophy of Robustness, Olivier Hamant. Éditions Odile Jacob, March 2024
- Antidote to the Cult of Performance: The Robustness of the Living, Olivier Hamant. Éditions Gallimard, August 2023
- Manifesto for a Common Health: Three Healths in Interdependence: Natural, Social, Human, Olivier Hamant, François Collart Dutilleul, Ioan Negrutiu, Fabrice Riem, Emmanuel Druon and Patrick Degeorges, Paris, Les Éditions Utopia, May 2023
- The Third Way of the Living, Olivier Hamant. Éditions Odile Jacob, February 2022
