Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. (New York: Random House, 2012).
This is not a particularly easy book to read, but contains a number of interesting ideas about the dangers of rigid systems. Taleb makes the argument that
Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile.
Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. This property is behind everything that has changed with time: evolution, culture, ideas, revolutions, political systems, technological innovation, cultural and economic success, corporate survival, good recipes,…the rise of cities, cultures, legal systems, equatorial forests, bacterial resistance…even our own existence as a species on this planet. And antifragility determines the boundary between what is living and organic (or complex), say, the human body, and what is inert, say, a physical object like the stapler on your desk. (pp. 3-4)
Overly prescriptive policies, regulations, and rules undermine the capacity of systems to respond quickly, flexibly, and creatively to changing environments. As good educators know, the best learning often occurs in unexpected, unscripted moments of classroom life. “Fragilistas” (those who value orderliness, stability, and predictability) might argue that learning cannot be left to such serendipity. Best practices are needed to assure that learning takes place. Improvement of educational systems engineered through “improvement science” might well carry the risk of enhancing fragility
… by suppressing randomness and volatility…Much of our modern structured, world has been harming us with top-down policies and contraptions…which do precisely this: an insult to the antifragility of systems. (p. 5)