The Illusion of Redundancy

The squeak of the marker was the only sound. Marcus was drawing our supply chain on the whiteboard, his diagram a confident series of boxes and arrows. Box A: Primary Supplier, Vietnam. Box B: Backup Supplier, Mexico. Two neat, parallel lines connected them to our assembly plant in Ohio. He capped the marker with a satisfying click. “We’re covered,” he said, looking at the 7 of us around the conference table. “If Vietnam has a lockdown, we pivot to Mexico. Redundancy.”

It was a beautiful diagram. Clean. Logical. The kind of thing that gets you a promotion. It was also a complete fantasy.

For 17 minutes, we’d been talking in circles about why both our Vietnamese and Mexican factories had simultaneously halted production of our flagship product. Both cited a sudden, critical shortage of ‘FX-227,’ the specific brilliant blue pigment that made our brand recognizable from 47 feet away. A coincidence, everyone said. A freak event. Black swan. But the silence in the room felt different. It wasn’t the silence of confusion. It was the heavier silence of a truth nobody wanted to voice.

Marcus stared at the board. The two clean, parallel lines suddenly looked flimsy, dishonest. “They’re separate operations,” he insisted, but his voice was thin. Sarah just waited. Finally, he uncapped the marker, the squeak now sounding like a scream, and drew a smaller box, far to the left. He labeled it ‘Pigment Source.’ Then he drew two new, converging lines-one from the Vietnam box, one from the Mexico box-that met at this single point. The whole diagram collapsed into a ‘Y’. Our beautiful, resilient, diversified supply chain was a fork, and we were stuck at the handle.

Geography vs. Resilience: The Hidden Choke Point

We spend our days updating dashboards and running risk-matrix software that gives us the illusion of control. It feels productive, like the hour I spent this morning installing updates for a forecasting program our team hasn’t actually used in three years. We tick the box for ‘Geographic Diversification’ and move on, feeling secure. We mistake geography for resilience. We believe that putting an ocean between Supplier A and Supplier B insulates us from risk, forgetting that they both drink from the same well.

This isn’t just about pigments. It’s about the specialty adhesive in a medical device, the specific microcontroller in an automotive ECU, the high-tensile thread in tactical gear. Deep in the network, past your supplier (Tier 1) and their supplier (Tier 2), there is almost always a Tier 3 choke point. A single company-or even a single factory in a single industrial park-that has quietly achieved a global monopoly on one unglamorous but absolutely essential component. And you will have no idea it exists until it’s gone.

Lessons from Personal Experience

I’ve always been skeptical of overly complex systems meant to solve simple problems, but I admit I got this wrong myself. Spectacularly. Years ago, I designed a redundant hosting architecture for a client. Two servers, different hosting companies. I even paid a premium for one to be on the West Coast and one on the East Coast. I presented a diagram not unlike Marcus’s.

Three months later, a construction crew accidentally severed a fiber optic bundle in downtown Ashburn, Virginia, and both sites went dark. It turned out both of my ‘separate’ hosting companies were just resellers for the same massive Amazon Web Services data center. I had diversified the brand name, not the infrastructure. I had built a fork.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a man named Peter B., who spent 17 years as a resettlement advisor for refugee families. His job was a masterclass in managing fragile, high-stakes supply chains where the ‘product’ was human life. He told me about the crisis in 2017, when multiple, independent aid organizations suddenly found they couldn’t get families out of a specific conflict zone. They had separate planes, different local contacts, distinct funding sources. They were, on paper, diversified. The problem? All of them, without realizing it, relied on a single, 67-year-old man in a neighboring country who processed the exit visas. He had the trust of the local authorities. He was the system. When he had a heart attack, the entire ‘diversified’ network ceased to exist.

Uncovering the Hidden Architecture

We are all on the same bridge.

The corporate world is no different. We just pretend it is because our spreadsheets tell us so. We demand our Tier 1 suppliers show us their risk mitigation plans, and they send back glossy PDFs filled with the same empty promises of diversification they know we want to hear. But what incentive do they have to map their own vulnerabilities for you? They often don’t even know. Their purchasing manager just buys the same pigment from the same distributor they’ve used for 7 years because the price is right. The real map, the one with all the ugly choke points and single points of failure, isn’t drawn in a boardroom. It’s written in bills of lading and shipping manifests.

We spent another 237 minutes in that meeting room. We ordered pizza. We drank stale coffee. Marcus’s diagram got messier and messier, filled with question marks and frantic scribbles. The clean illusion was gone, replaced by a complex, terrifying, and honest picture of our reality. It was a picture of total dependence masquerading as strategic independence.

Seeing the Unseen

We’ve become obsessed with last-mile delivery and optimizing our own warehouses, polishing the final link in the chain until it shines. But the whole thing is anchored to mountains we’ve never seen, held together by bolts forged in factories whose names we’ll never learn.