The Resilience Dividend: Why Workforce Redundancy Is NSW’s Competitive Advantage
(Building anti-fragile labour systems for global uncertainty)
Published on 8 September 2025
When we talk about workforce strategy in New South Wales, the conversation often gravitates toward efficiency: lowering costs, streamlining headcount, automating tasks. But as the shocks of the past five years have made clear — from border closures to energy crises to regional skills shortages — efficiency alone is not enough.
True competitiveness lies not in trimming every ounce of “fat” from the system, but in cultivating redundancy as a strategic asset. In other words, what looks like “slack” on the balance sheet is often the source of resilience when the unexpected arrives.
From Lean to Anti-Fragile
The last generation of workforce design has been dominated by lean thinking. Firms optimised rosters to the minute, migrated training costs onto workers, and squeezed margins through just-in-time staffing. But lean is brittle. A single supply shock or pandemic-era border closure exposes how vulnerable a workforce is when every role is critical and no buffer exists.
Anti-fragile systems — a term borrowed from complex systems theory — take the opposite approach. They deliberately build in flexibility, redundancy, and optionality. In workforce terms, this means:
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Overlapping capabilities: multiple employees trained for the same mission-critical tasks.
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Multi-entry pipelines: sourcing talent through skilled migration, vocational education, and PALM/DAMA schemes simultaneously.
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Cross-regional depth: tapping into labour pools across districts rather than relying on a single catchment.
These strategies may appear “inefficient” in a quarterly P&L lens, but they generate what I call the resilience dividend — the compounded benefit of being able to absorb shocks, maintain production, and even seize market share when others falter.
NSW’s Unique Position
Nowhere is this more relevant than NSW. The state sits at the intersection of several structural pressures:
- An ageing domestic workforce, especially in regional industries.
- Increasing volatility in global migration pathways.
- Accelerating industrial transformation in energy, food processing, and advanced manufacturing.
Yet these very pressures also make NSW the testbed for workforce resilience. Unlike smaller economies, NSW can leverage scale, diversity, and decentralisation. A well-designed system of labour redundancy across regional hubs — Wagga, Griffith, the Hunter, Dubbo — creates a networked workforce capable of flexing where demand and supply shift.
Redundancy as a Competitive Advantage
Let’s be clear: redundancy here does not mean duplication or waste. It means:
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Surge capacity: the ability to scale production up without destabilising operations.
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Risk buffering: mitigating the impact of turnover, visa policy shifts, or training bottlenecks.
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Innovation bandwidth: freeing up human capital to trial new processes without risking core delivery.
In practice, redundancy allows firms to bid for contracts others can’t fulfil, to sustain growth during global downturns, and to retain institutional knowledge rather than resetting with each cycle of churn. It transforms “slack” into a competitive moat.
What Leaders Should Do Now
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Audit vulnerability, not just cost: Map where your workforce would break under disruption, not only where it is most expensive.
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Invest in parallel pipelines: Don’t choose between apprenticeships and skilled migration; build both.
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Design redundancy into capability frameworks: Ensure multiple staff can step into mission-critical roles.
- Shift metrics: Measure resilience, optionality, and time-to-recover, not just cost-per-hire or vacancy fill time.
The Payoff
Global uncertainty is not an aberration; it is the new baseline. NSW businesses that grasp this will see workforce redundancy not as a liability but as an insurance policy that pays out in competitiveness, market share, and long-term survival.
That is the resilience dividend — and it will define which firms thrive in the decades ahead.
When we talk about workforce strategy in New South Wales, the conversation often gravitates toward efficiency: lowering costs, streamlining headcount, automating tasks. But as the shocks of the past five years have made clear — from border closures to energy crises to regional skills shortages — efficiency alone is not enough.
True competitiveness lies not in trimming every ounce of “fat” from the system, but in cultivating redundancy as a strategic asset. In other words, what looks like “slack” on the balance sheet is often the source of resilience when the unexpected arrives.