Beyond performance: why robustness resonates with the way we are building Slo
- Géraldine Wirtz
- 9 hours ago
- 8 min read
Since its creation, Slo has been driven by a simple conviction: if organisations need to transform to address today’s environmental and societal challenges, then consulting companies should be willing to question their own ways of operating too.
Like many organisations working on sustainability, we spend a lot of time helping clients navigate complexity, uncertainty, and long-term transitions. Yet these dynamics also apply to us. How do we make decisions? How do we organise work? How do we distribute responsibilities? What kind of growth do we want? And ultimately, what does success look like? These questions have been present since the early days of Slo.
Rather than pursuing growth for growth’s sake, we have always aspired to build a company that remains human-sized, prioritises meaningful relationships, and creates the conditions for high quality work. A company that is financially healthy and impactful, but also enjoyable to be part of. Because if organisations are ultimately made of people, then their success should also be measured by their ability to help those people learn, contribute, connect, and thrive.
Table of contents
1.Navigating a world within planetary boundaries
These reflections are closely connected to the work we do every day.
Most of our work revolves around helping organisations navigate transformations linked to climate change, resource constraints, biodiversity loss, shifting regulations, evolving stakeholder expectations, and increasing uncertainty. Behind these challenges lies a fundamental reality: our economies ultimately depend on natural systems operating within planetary boundaries.
For decades, our economic systems have largely been built around a simple objective: more growth, more efficiency, more productivity, more output. This model has undeniably generated innovation, wealth, scientific progress, and improvements in quality of life for millions of people. But it has also come with side effects that are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Environmental degradation, resource depletion, growing inequalities and the concentration of wealth among a relatively small share of the population remind us that growth alone does not translate into collective prosperity.
As the impacts of climate change become more visible and planetary boundaries are increasingly exceeded, a legitimate question arises:
Can organisations continue pursuing optimisation and growth as their primary objectives, or do we need another definition of success?
2.A different kind of ambition
At Slo, we believe this question deserves serious attention. Not because we are against growth or because we think organisations should stop being ambitious. And certainly not because we believe people should settle for less. On the contrary, we believe the challenges ahead call for even greater ambition than before:
to create organisations that generate value without undermining the systems they depend on
to build business that remain relevant and resilient over the long term rather than optimising only for the next quarter
to contribute to a society where prosperity is shared more broadly and where success is measured by more than financial performance alone
and perhaps more importantly, to create organisations where people can genuinely be happy.
The environmental transition is often framed as a story of constraints, sacrifices, and things we will have to give up. While limits are indeed part of the conversation, we believe this narrative is incomplete. What if the transition was also an opportunity to:
build more meaningful organisations?
reconnect economic activity with the realities of the living world?
strengthen communities?
create work that people find purposeful?
design cities, products, services and businesses that are essential and improve quality of life?
In short, to build a future that is not only sustainable, but desirable?
Some might consider this vision naïve or overly optimistic… it is true that in a world that often rewards short-term results, talking about happiness, fulfilment or collective wellbeing can sometimes sound idealistic. But we see it differently, we see it as deeply pragmatic. Because an organisation that burns out its people, exhausts its resources, weakens its ecosystems or loses the trust of society is ultimately not a successful organisation, regardless of its financial performance.
Organisations that create strong relationships, nurture learning, maintain their capacity to adapt and contribute positively to the world around them are likely to be better equipped for the future. In many ways, this is how we understand concepts such as robustness and sobriety: not as restrictions but as an invitation to focus on what truly matters.
3.Robustness as a natural continuation of our journey
The concept of robustness is not entirely new to us as questions of resilience, adaptability, collective intelligence, governance, long-term thinking, and the ability to thrive in uncertainty have always shaped the way we think about organisations. In many ways, robustness provides a language and a framework for ideas we have been exploring since the creation of Slo.
This is why we decided to dedicate our last spring offsite to the concept through the fresque de la robustesse, inspired by the work of French biologist Olivier Hamant.
His central argument is that living systems do not optimise for performance, they optimise for robustness. Where performance seeks to maximise output under a given set of conditions, robustness seeks to maintain the ability to function, adapt, and evolve when those conditions change. Many of the characteristics that make living systems robust appear, at first glance, to contradict the principles that modern organisations often seek to maximise. Yet they may hold valuable lessons for organisations navigating an increasingly unstable world.
The 6 pillars of robustness
Redundancy: avoiding single points of failure
In many organisations, redundancy is often perceived as waste: why have two people involved in something if one could do it alone? Why duplicate resources or knowledge?
But living systems are full of redundancies: many birds and rabbits build several nests to reduce their vulnerability to predators. Plants produce multiple flowers and branches, far beyond what would be strictly necessary. Living systems are full of overlapping functions and backup mechanisms.
From a robustness perspective, redundancy is not inefficiency, it is insurance. By ensuring that several elements can perform similar functions, systems become less vulnerable when one component fails. Redundancy also creates the conditions for diversity and adaptation, because it allows different variations to coexist.
At Slo, this principle influences how we organise projects. Whenever possible, we try to avoid situations where a single person carries all the knowledge or responsibility for a project. While this may require additional coordination, it also means we are better equipped to deal with life’s inevitable surprises.
Heterogeneity: cultivating diversity
Monocultures can be highly productive under stable conditions. They can also be remarkably fragile. A single disease, pest, or environmental change can threaten an entire system because every element responds in the same way. Natural ecosystems operate differently. Their strength comes from the diversity of species, functions, and interactions they contain. Diversity creates options, and options create adaptability.
This principle extends far beyond biodiversity, it applies equally to teams, organisations, and governance systems. When people with similar backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives make decisions together, blind spots become more likely. Diversity of viewpoints creates productive tension and often leads to more robust outcomes.
This is one of the reasons why slocracy places importance on collective decision-making. By involving different people in strategic discussions, we seek to reduce the risk of groupthink and enrich the quality of decisions through a broader range of perspectives.
Randomness: making space for the unexpected
Most organisations strive to reduce uncertainty wherever possible. Yet living systems rely on randomness as one of their most powerful mechanisms for adaptation.
Genetic mutations occur without predefined plan. Most have little impact, some are detrimental, but occasionally they create traits that become valuable when environments change. Without randomness, evolution would simply not exist.
For organisations, this does not mean replacing strategy with improvisation. It means recognising that not every opportunity can be predicted in advance. Introducing a degree of randomness allows new ideas, connections, and possibilities to emerge.
At Slo, this often takes the form of exploring subjects beyond our immediate field of expertise. Team members regularly attend events on topics ranging from artificial intelligence and geopolitics to the search for extraterrestrial life. These experiences may not always have an obvious connection to sustainability, yet they often challenge assumptions and inspire new ways of thinking.
Incompletion: remaining open to evolution
Modern organisations often seek closure: projects are expected to be completed, processed finalised, and plans fully defined.
Living systems tell a different story. A tree is never truly finished. Throughout its life, it continues growing, adapting, repairing, and responding to its environment. Its unfinished nature is not a weakness but a source of resilience.
Robust systems remain open to change because they never assume that the current state is final. This perspective invites organisations to embrace experimentation and accept a degree of incompleteness.
At Slo, we have accumulated our fair share of unfinished initiatives, half-developed ideas, and internal projects waiting patiently on a shelf. While this can sometimes be frustrating, it also means that opportunities remain available to be revisited when the context becomes right.
Inefficiency: preserving room for adaptation
Few ideas challenge contemporary management practices as much as inefficiency. For decades, organisations have been encouraged to optimise processes, maximise utilisation rates, and eliminate any form of excess capacity.
Nature, however, rarely operates at maximum efficiency. Most trees produce far more seeds than will ever become mature trees. Living systems continuously generate surplus. What appears as waste from one perspective often becomes a resource for another organism within the ecosystem. This apparent inefficiency provides a buffer against uncertainty. By remaining below the theoretical optimum, systems gain the flexibility needed to absorb shocks and adapt to changing conditions.
For organisations, this raises an important question: how much spare capacity is necessary for learning, innovation, and resilience? At Slo, one of our long-term ambitions has been to limit project allocation to around 80% of people’s time, leaving space for learning, internal initiatives, community-building, and experimentation. We have not yet fully achieved this objective, as financial viability remains a very real constraint, but it is one of the many ways we continue exploring what robustness could look like in practice.
Slowness: creating time for learning and reflection
Speed is often associated with performance. Yet in living systems, some of the most robust structures emerge through slow processes. Trees grow slowly in order to develop stronger roots and trunks. Ecosystems evolve over decades, centuries, and sometimes millennia. Adaptation requires time.
Slowness should not be confused with inaction. Rather, it reflects a willingness to invest the time necessary to learn, reflect, and build solid foundations. In organisations, this can feel counterintuitive: taking time away from immediate delivery often appears inefficient in the short term. Yet without moment of reflection, organisations risk becoming highly efficient at moving in the wrong direction.
This is one of the reasons why Slo organises quarterly offsites, often aligned with the changing seasons. These moments allow us to step back from day-to-day activities, strengthen relationships, align expectations, and collectively reflect on how we want to evolve as an organisation. Far from slowing us down, these pauses help us navigate uncertainty with greater clarity and intention.
4.Robustness as a compass
Exploring this topic reminded us that robustness is not a management framework to implement or a checklist to complete… it is a different way of looking at organisations, a reminder that resilience sometimes matters more than optimisation and that adaptability can be more valuable than efficiency.
The organisations best equipped for the future may not be those that maximise performance at all costs, but those that cultivate the capacity to evolve alongside a changing world.
For Slo, robustness is therefore less a destination than a compass. It is a way of guiding our decisions as we continue experimenting with governance, collaboration, and new ways of creating value within planetary boundaries. And perhaps, a way of building organisations that are not only more sustainable, but also more resilient, more meaningful, and ultimately happier places to be.
Written by Géraldine Wirtz, co-founder of Slo
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