Graceful Degradation
The ability of a system to continue functioning at reduced capacity when components fail, rather than failing completely. Performance degrades proportionally to damage.
Used in the Books
This term appears in 2 chapters:
"Toyota's vehicles include diagnostic systems that monitor communication between modules, flagging interface failures for repair. Design for graceful degradation: When possible, interfaces should allow partial functionality if some connections fail rather than complete system failure."
"...s, suggesting that beyond two, the additional resilience doesn't justify the additional cost. Neural Redundancy: Distributed Representations and Graceful Degradation The nervous system exhibits redundancy through distributed representations - encoding information across populations of neurons rather than in singl..."
Biological Context
Brain function degrades gracefully with neuron loss—small damage causes small deficits. Ecosystems losing species often maintain function through compensation by remaining species. Graceful degradation contrasts with brittle systems that fail catastrophically when any component fails.
Business Application
Well-designed organizations degrade gracefully: losing one salesperson reduces revenue proportionally, not catastrophically. Brittle organizations collapse when any critical component fails.