The Strategy of Being Small - Resilience at the Edges
Still Thinking Series: Part 4
The final post in this series, drawing from the McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 2025 and lived experience, explores why smallness isn’t failure-it’s a strategy. Especially in an age of fragile systems and runaway scale.
Big used to be the goal.
Big data. Big tech. Big transformations.
But the further we push scale, the more we encounter its shadow:
Fragility. Bottlenecks. Delay. Dependency.
And in that shadow, a quiet question appears:
What if small isn’t a constraint - but a design principle?
When Systems Strain, Edges Matter
As discussed in Digital Is Physical Now, infrastructure is reaching its limits. Energy, compute, logistics, and policy are stretched. AI demands are surging, but centralised systems can’t always meet them.
This is where the edges become interesting:
Distributed compute, not just centralised clusters
Localised manufacturing and sovereign infrastructure
Community-scale resilience instead of global brittleness
Context-aware design, not one-size-fits-all platforms
In a world of increasing complexity, small systems are legible.
And what’s legible is governable, trustable, and adaptable.
Systems Worth Living With Are Often Built Smaller
This isn't nostalgia. It’s pragmatism.
Smaller systems:
Fail slower
Adapt faster
Are easier to govern
Often align better with local needs and values
These ideas echo Elinor Ostrom’s work on commons, Christopher Alexander’s design patterns, and even indigenous governance systems: scale what’s necessary, but honour the human boundary.
Reclaiming the Local - Not as Heritage, but as Strategy
For me, this is personal.
In Digital Products and the Places They Don’t Reach, I wrote about the disconnect between slick digital systems and regional life. Cooma. Country roads. Patchy coverage. But also: community. Coherence. Place.
There’s deep strategic power in designing with place in mind.
Not to limit reach—but to build relevance.
Not to resist scale—but to redeem it.
Because when you build small, you often build close.
And closeness is its own kind of bandwidth.
Small Systems, Big Questions
So what does a “small” strategy look like?
It might mean:
Shipping a hyper-focused product with one clear use case
Running AI models on local hardware rather than the cloud
Prioritising energy efficiency over performance benchmarks
Building policy that works in a single council before going statewide
Trusting that less coordination can sometimes mean more coherence
This isn’t anti-growth.
It’s right-sized growth-resilient, regenerating, relational.
Closing Thought
Scale will always seduce. But it’s not always what’s needed.
Sometimes, the strongest systems aren’t the ones that reach farthest.
They’re the ones that stay standing.
Small is strategic.
Local is liveable.
And in the end, it might be the edges that hold everything together.