The advocates of inherently safer process design have promoted "intensification" as a way to reduce the amounts of dangerous chemicals contained in a process. The idea is to design equipment to minimize the inventory of hazardous material so that the safety and environmental consequences of loss of containment are reduced in the event of a large leak from the process equipment. However, little consideration of the impact of these small holdups on the dynamic controllability of the process has been discussed in the literature. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate that intensification can sometimes adversely affect the dynamics and result in larger disturbances from normal process operation because of changes in process feed rates or conditions, process utility disturbances, or other external environmental factors. Because a "robust" process, one that can tolerate significant changes from its external environment, is also a strategy for inherently safer design, this represents an interesting conflict in designing inherently safer processes and one that has not received much attention in the literature. These disturbances in process operation can result in increased safety risks as well as poorer product quality. Four examples are presented to illustrate the effects. The first is a distillation system with two columns in series. The effect of reducing the base holdup in the first column on the performance of the second column is presented. The second example compares a single large CSTR with two smaller CSTRs operated in series. The third example compares a large fedbatch reactor system, in which a highly unstable reaction mixture can be reliably avoided, with a much smaller CSTR process, in which instrument failure could rapidly lead to an explosion. The final example considers a distillation in which hydrogen cyanide is separated from water. The dynamic response of a conventionally designed column is compared with that of a column in which tray liquid holdups are deliberately increased, which contradicts intensification principles. The intensified designs of all of these processes exhibit significantly poorer dynamics.