Redundancy is not waste — it is the hidden architecture of resilience. Network engineers discovered this the hard way in the 1960s, when Paul Baran at RAND argued, against every economic instinct in the room, that a communications network should route around damage rather than optimize for efficiency. His insight was architectural and moral simultaneously: a system built for perfection in normal conditions is catastrophically fragile at its edges. The Yoruba philosophical tradition carries a structural parallel in the concept of *àṣà* — the living repertoire of accumulated practice that a community maintains precisely because not every contingency can be anticipated in advance. You don't know which practice you'll need until the crisis arrives, so you preserve more than seems immediately useful. For finance IT, this is not a theoretical comfort — it is the discipline of building systems that can degrade gracefully rather than fail completely. Every time a team strips out a 'redundant' process to hit a sprint velocity target, ask whether they are optimizing the system or just making it thinner.

In the last major incident your team handled, which part of your infrastructure held because someone had over-engineered it — and is that redundancy still there?

Drawing from Yoruba Philosophy (àṣà) / Cold War Systems Engineering — Paul Baran (On Distributed Communications, RAND Memoranda, 1964, on distributed versus centralized network topology as a survival strategy under degraded conditions)