Robustness
Robustness is the ability to keep a system stable despite fluctuations, in the short and the long term. Biologist Olivier Hamant defines it as creating the conditions in which one does not fall.
Applied to digital technology, the notion requires a distinction that changes its meaning entirely: digital technology itself cannot be robust.
Why
This is the position argued in the 2025 white paper Voyage vers la robustesse, published by Infogreen Factory with ADEME, Inria and CNRS.
Digital technology rests on resources and infrastructure it does not control: component supply, metal availability, grid stability, global logistics. Those foundations are fragile. A system built on them can be strengthened; it cannot be made insensitive to fluctuation.
The white paper therefore adopts an explicit convention: resilience qualifies digital systems, robustness qualifies the organisation.
Robustness against performance
Hamant's thesis runs against the pursuit of performance. An optimised system is tuned to given conditions and becomes fragile as soon as those conditions change. Robustness assumes margins, redundancy and a degree of deliberate inefficiency, which is what living systems have always practised.
Transposed to organisations, this is uncomfortable: it means giving up efficiency gains in order to retain the capacity to absorb shocks.
Two principles
- Non-regression
- technology must augment existing capabilities, not replace them. The test: if the tool disappeared tomorrow, the organisation should be able to return at least to the situation preceding its adoption.
- Constrained resilience
- where substitution is unavoidable, resilience must be organised deliberately through redundancy, diversification, controlled degradation and supervision.
Both principles oppose the techno-solutionist reflex of answering each problem with an additional technological layer, which adds complexity and therefore dependence.
