Redundancy is usually treated as waste — the extra server, the backup plan, the skill you don't currently need. Nassim Taleb calls systems that gain from disorder 'antifragile,' but the less-discussed mechanism behind that gain is slack: resources held in reserve, not deployed. Here's what makes this strange when applied to career growth — the moves that compound over a decade are almost never the ones that were efficient in the moment. The organizational theorist James March made this precise in a 1991 paper on exploration versus exploitation: organizations (and people) that optimize too hard for current strengths systematically starve the adjacent competencies that would have unlocked the next level. The professional who looks maximally productive right now — every hour billable, every skill leveraged — is often running at zero slack, which means zero capacity to reach toward something genuinely new. One concrete application: the next time you're offered a project that sits slightly outside your current expertise at the cost of some efficiency, the inefficiency is not the problem. It is the point.

Name a competency you've been avoiding developing because you're already too good at something nearby.

Drawing from Organizational Learning Theory synthesized with Complexity Economics — James G. March