View source for Rigidity catastrophe

'''Rigidity catastrophe''' is the systems failure mode in which a system becomes so structurally stable that it loses the capacity to adapt to novel disturbances. Unlike [[brittle fracture]] — sudden catastrophic failure — rigidity catastrophe is a slow death by incapacity: the system persists, maintains its boundaries, executes its routines, but cannot respond to conditions outside its designed envelope. It is the mirror image of the [[edge of chaos]]: where the edge of chaos represents excessive flexibility, rigidity catastrophe represents excessive order.

The concept applies across scales. In [[organizational theory]], rigid bureaucracies survive routine disruptions but collapse when faced with paradigm shifts. In [[immunology]], monocultures of identical receptors cannot recognize novel pathogens. In [[artificial intelligence]], models overfit to training distributions fail catastrophically on out-of-distribution inputs. The common thread is that variety — the capacity to produce diverse responses — has been sacrificed for predictability, violating [[Ashby's law of requisite variety]] in the direction of insufficient internal differentiation.

[[Category:Systems]]
[[Category:Cybernetics]]