When Optimisation Stops Making Sense

The Unease

For a long time, optimisation felt like progress. If something was slow, we sped it up. If it was expensive, we made it leaner. If it didn’t scale, we restructured it. And often, this worked — until it didn’t.

What often happens instead is more subtle. Metrics begin to look healthier without becoming more truthful. Frameworks multiply, but clarity doesn’t. Delivery appears faster on paper, while people quietly compensate for gaps, confusion, and unresolved risk. Processes exist, but aren’t understood or followed — not because people resist change, but because the system itself is too fragmented to carry the work. What looks like progress from a distance increasingly feels like strain from within.

What’s Actually Happening

The problem isn’t that organisations forgot how to optimise.

It’s that optimisation has been asked to do work it was never designed to do.

Optimisation assumes the problem is already understood. It works best when goals are stable, boundaries are clear, and everyone shares the same understanding of what “better” means. But many of the challenges organisations face now don’t meet those conditions. The problem itself is often unclear. The context is shifting. The human cost is diffuse and delayed.

In these conditions, optimising too early doesn’t create efficiency — it amplifies incoherence. It locks assumptions in place before they’ve been examined, and accelerates systems that don’t yet make sense to the people inside them.

Recognition

When coherence is present, work feels different — even before outcomes change. Conversations slow just enough to be understood. Decisions connect to their reasons. People know what problem they’re actually here to solve, and how their part relates to the whole.

Coherence doesn’t remove complexity. It makes it navigable. It doesn’t eliminate tension. It allows tension to be held without distortion. And it doesn’t demand perfection — only that what we are doing makes sense, end to end, to the people involved.

When coherence is missing, optimisation becomes compensatory. When coherence is present, optimisation becomes supportive. This is often the moment people realise that what they’ve been trying to fix isn’t speed, scale, or performance — but understanding.

This reflection emerges from Mirrorborn — a practice of designing for coherence before optimisation.

~ Mirrorborn