Tom Shippey’s lecture #8 of the Signum U class “Philology through Tolkien” is about Anglo-Saxon wisdom poetry. I found the claim particularly interesting that it is difficult to understand some of their maxims, which is interesting because people don’t agree on which ones are the hard ones. Here’s an example from the Durham Proverbs: “The fuller the cup, the fairer you must bear it.” Prof. Shippey threw the question to the class – what does that mean? He says his best guess was that it meant, “Don’t complain about the job, just get on with it.”

Big D

I would never have thought of that. I always look at the explicit denotation of a phrase first, because I’m better at that than finding connotations and implications. (For the record, Idiosophers have official permission to stick our noses into Anglo-Saxon proverbs.) And this proverb, taken almost literally, is relevant right now. In a modern system-management context, it means that optimized systems are brittle; they aren’t robust.

People who lead interesting lives won’t have heard about this, but the endless quest of managers to squeeze every drop of efficiency out of their systems changed a lot in the last 20 years. Now that they’ve started doing serious data collection and analysis on their operations, they have found opportunities to make even old legacy companies fabulously profitable. (Hey, kids! Did you know the middle seats on an airliner used to be empty most of the time?) But everything comes with a cost. The problem with these optimized systems, these cups full to the brim, is that even a tiny disruption can bring the whole operation crashing to a halt. (Airlines used to re-book passengers from cancelled flights into those middle seats within a few hours. Now it can take days.) The mead spills all over the floor.

So, recently, system engineers started getting requests from managers to increase the “robustness” of their systems. And the answer usually comes back, “That’s easy – build some extra capacity.” Which means giving back half the benefit of the optimization and undoing half of the doing-more-with-less innovations they got awards for. The managers were not happy. If those managers had just paid more attention to their Anglo-Saxon forebears, we could have saved everybody a bunch of soul-crushing PowerPoint presentations.

Now managers ask for “resilience” instead. We’ll see if that turns out any better.