As Society 5.0 is on the horizon, a fresh batch of upheavals will strike most organizations as emerging technologies, market dynamics and people’s relationship with work will change. 

This means that, yet again, organizations will have to face Change. It means a lot of power plays will happen, a lot of money will be spent (and often wasted), a lot of people will be stressed and a lot of company will fail their changes in a way that will cost them far more than just money. 

Just talk about Change in your organization and you’ll see the fear in the look of the people around you. “Not AGAIN.” 

We see Change as something big, put in motion as events. Each requires solid change management skills to build a strong strategy, communicate it appropriately, deliver the plan, manage expectations and manage for resistance to change. All of these things are difficult and the bigger the changes, the more difficult they are. 

Big changes will always be stressful. It will be difficult for humans who have evolved stress to improve their survivability during unexpected and uncertain events. It will be difficult for organizations built like machines: precise, ordered and predictable. The more you add stress, the more the resistance and the higher the chances something breaks. 

So how to approach those big Change events to execute them successfully? 

Don’t. 

Lean experts have been advocating for creating a culture of continuous improvement, of constant small changes. This is great, as it creates a culture of constant dynamism. For people, those changes are not violent, events or big enough to put them in danger. For organizations, it requires a reorganization into a living, dynamic structure, much closer to a natural ecosystem. 

But that the theory. “In the real world, it doesn’t work like that Maurice.” Big changes often end up not working or paying off as intended. Companies either aren’t Lean or have adopted parts of a Lean model. Old habits die hard, and they still manage their changes from a central authority. I have met my fair share of Lean change experts who will spend months analyzing change impacts, devising change management plans and creating communication plans for the rollout of those changes. Or of companies that ask for continuous improvements and innovation, and yet stifle any attempts of locally modifying behaviors and dynamics that haven’t been decided/designed/approved by a central authority. Where’s the Lean in that? 

Just asking for companies to allow their divisions, like teams, to innovate without interference, or even better with their full support, is wishful thinking. Why? Because until those companies changes, anyone initiating those changes will be at risk and will face resistance. In Jack: Straight from the Gut, Jack Welch describes his attempts at bringing change to General Electric, as a CEO, akin to starting a war and throwing grenades. If it’s that difficult when you are in charge, imagine when you are just a cog in the machine. 

Sure, teams can achieve a limited form of continuous improvement. As long as it doesn’t rattle the rest of the organization, it can work well. But it is limited. It can be so much more than that. And if we want to evolve a company to adapt to the emerging world of Industry 4.0 and Society 5.0, it’s a situation we need to address. 

To understand the underlying problem bringing changes in companies, one that becomes clear when we use a bit of system theory and learn how complex systems work. 

Explaining the problem

We’re going to do a bit of theory now, so please bear with me. 

One standard model of complex systems is the hierarchical model, where specialized systems of varying complexities nested within one another. Like companies. 

One of the most frequent problems with hierarchical systems is that the healthy dynamics between the hierarchical levels becomes skewed. 

Hierarchies evolve from bottom to top, from the lowest level to the highest, from the cell to the whole organism. The lower you go in a hierarchy, the faster the evolution rate. Those lower levels are the front line of the complex hierarchical system and as such have to respond a lot more precise and specialized stimuli.

The highest-level system, like the brain or the board of directors, still has a critical role to play: it must give a general direction, a purpose, to this evolution. Without it, lower systems will evolve fast in often unpredictable, and undesirable, directions. Like cancer. The higher-level system parses vast quantities of information coming from all the sub-systems, but that information is more straightforward, higher-level, already digested into something less complicated. 

Both high-level and low-level systems have their precise roles. The common mistake is to give too much power to one or the other. 

In a company, the most common issue is too much power taken by upper management. They know where they want to company to go and request departments and teams to execute their plans to get there. But that kind of centralized power comes at the loss of most of the information that should be gathered and processed by the teams. The team’s focus becomes execution rather than intelligence and adaptation. Information only trickles up within the system rather than flow and is usually ignored until it can’t be anymore. Innovation is stifled, hurting the capacity of the entire organization to adapt to change. 

On the other hand, not enough guidance form the upper management and the various teams will only react to their own, immediate situation. This will cause a significant loss of cohesion and productivity across the entire company. We don’t see this situation as often as too much control from management, as it requires a decentralized, self-organizing model, like Holacracy, which is still rare. 

The principle remains similar for governments. Too much control at the top and you create a totalitarian regime, replacing natural adaptability, innovation, and evolution by whatever is deemed the priority of the moment by the government. Too little regulations and you get tax avoidance (which prevent the delivery of shared services), monopolies concentrating common resources (such as money) in few hands, crime and other similar system-related problems. More often than not, governments strive for a balance but end up with too much and too little at once: constraints who end up benefitting large conglomerate while killing small businesses, help for specific slices of the population that ends up trapping them in a situation where they need that help, over or under-reacting to a challenge because they focus on the wrong reasons (such as an upcoming election), etc. This situation is a result of addressing symptoms without understanding the underlying system. 

Fixing the imbalance

If we fix that power imbalance, not with a single patchwork but with a change of internal dynamics to align how the company works with how a complex hierarchical system works, then we can hope of creating an organization that is a dynamic system under constant evolution and improvement. 

My favorite model to remedy to this power balance is based on an approach described by Dave Gray in his book The Connected Company. He calls it podularity. It is a model, not a framework or a complete, complex solution. To make it work for you, you need to fiddle with it a bit, you need to keep communications going, and you need to keep it alive and evolving. For organizations that adopt a Lean mindset, this is right up their alley. 

In this model, management establishes goals, constraints, and resources into sandboxes. Teams are wholly self-organizing but attached to a sandbox. Teams get their resources from the sandbox but must contribute information and effort toward the goal as well as respecting the constraints. The system is very alive as the sandboxes will evolve, with their resources and constraints adjusted based on the information contributed by all the teams attached, while still aiming for the goal determined by management. Teams who don’t follow the rules of their sandbox can’t draw resources from it and will need to attach to a more appropriate sandbox or starve and be eliminated by the system. The beauty of this model is that it is self-correcting and the power distribution between higher and lower systems stays in balance through the sandbox. It makes for a very organic model and can be scaled to apply to a government level.

One of the strengths of the model is that it is possible the to progressively introduce it within an organization. Start with the groups that are ready and willing. Make sure their sandbox includes everything both they and you need to give them their independence. Then let them deliver results and improve the system. Make sure their successes and challenges are well communicated across the organization, so other groups can open their minds to it and start thinking how it can work for them. 

I often talk about decentralized organizations. Well, this is it. 

Just like adequately working complex hierarchical systems, the higher systems set high-level goals and constraints. Lower-level systems must work within these guidelines but can evolve fast to adapt to their changing environment. They can also influence the guidelines to make sure they are kept relevant. The entire complex system will slowly adjust and evolve as a result of all the small local changes, slowly modifying the dynamic of the whole organization. The entire dynamic feel more natural, reducing stress across the whole system as the scale of actions, decisions, and consequences is vastly reduced. Autonomy and reduced scale allow for experimentations, leading to innovation and adaptability. 

It does require a will for the central authority to let go of its power and redefine its role. This kind of transformation starts with the top, not as a big change management plan, but rather as a will to let go. The hardest changes in the culture of an organization rarely come from the team, but instead, it comes from the organization’s leaders. A desire for change and a willingness to do what it takes are two very different things. 

If you want to know more

While using this model isn’t overly complicated or difficult, it helps to know what you are doing. 

I recommend reading Dave Gray’s The connected Company. Not only is the decentralized model outline there, but the whole book is a fascinating read, showing us clearly why companies need to evolve their habits, as the old ways won’t work anymore. 

I’m involved with two companies that can advise and support you if you are interested in evolving your organization toward such a model. 

Octant organizes seminars and retreats, both privates and open to the public. Decentralized model is a subject we often cover. 

If you want to adopt this model and require training or coaching for your organization, get in touch and I’ll hook you up.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

I’ve been wanting to write about this topic for a while. Here is the story of a career that was shattered, reconstructed, and is now more solid and resistant, and gains opportunities without suffering the stress caused by chaos and adversity.

Antifragile in a nutshell

For those who don’t know the concept of antifragility, I will summarize it in a few lines, but you can also read this awesome article by Maurice Lefebvre on the topic: What is Antifragility and How Can It Help Me?

Antifragility is a theory according to which the opposite of fragility isn’t solidity or resilience. If chaos and adversity destroy fragile systems, the opposite would be a system that improves under stress and adversity. Resilience, the capacity to not be affected by chaos and adversity, stands between the two.

Fragile systems offer impressive results when in a context that’s is the best for their purpose and are very often over-optimized. However, they won’t resist very well to most forms of stress and chaos.

The examples that are often given to explain fragile systems are a glass of wine that shatters under a shock, a very performing Formula 1 car that disintegrates quickly as soon as it gets out of its racetrack. In myths, it will be compared to Damocles, who accepted to become King for a day but had to sit under a sword that was suspended by a single hair of a horse’s tail that could fall on his head at any time. I also like to use the example of the Titanic, renowned for being fast and unsinkable, but that wasn’t agile enough to veer in time and avoid an iceberg.

Solid or resilient systems are simply not affected by chaos and punishment. Not only that, they simply ignore those conditions and continue doing what they were doing.

In this case, one will often use the analogy of a plastic glass that won’t break if it falls, and farm equipment that can work during any season, no matter the weather. In myths, resilience will be explained with the phoenix, that will be reborn from its ashes every time it dies and stays unchanged.

Antifragile systems will improve with chaos and adversity. They won’t be as optimized or performing as fragile systems, nor will they be as resistant as solid systems. But they will never stop improving under stress.

Imagine a glass that improves when you drop it: every time, it becomes more resistant as its matter transforms. The most concrete and understandable comparison is with the human body. Whoever is into sports knows very well that when under stress, the body improves. Muscles improve by working out, so does cardio. The system isn’t over-optimized: if one suffers from a lung perforation or loses a kidney, there is a second one that will allow us to survive. In mythology, antifragility will often be explained with the hydra which had many heads. Every time one would cut one of its head, two would grow back in its place.

But even antifragile systems won’t survive to too much stress: someone who never ran before will collapse during a marathon, and one might tear a muscle by lifting too much weight. And the hydra? Heads would not grow back when the wound was cauterized quickly enough.

My career was fragile

A long time ago, I used to work for the same organization for many years. I progressed a lot in this company, and I liked it very much. I was involved in all the social clubs, and everything. I was contacted very often by recruiters, but I wouldn’t read any of their messages: I loved my job and I didn’t want to work anywhere else.

Chaos and adversity showed up when this company and I had to part ways. I wasn’t ready for this at that time: I had no network, no career plan, not even a backup plan. My résumé hadn’t been updated in almost 10 years.

The worst part: my role in this organization didn’t exist really on the job market. My comfort zone, in which I was wallowing, was so comfortable that I wouldn’t leave it. Because of this, I didn’t explore the different options that I had, nor did I show the necessary curiosity to diversify the value I was bringing.

My career was fragile as my role was obsolete, and I had a fixed mindset that would keep me from growing. I didn’t want to take any risks. But the risk found me.

When we say something is fragile, and such a shock happens… My career was in pieces. Impossible to find something equivalent, my technical skills weren’t up to date. My morale ended up in the same state: ripped in pieces. It has been the most difficult event of my career. Today, it is also the most important one as I wouldn’t be where I am if it didn’t happen.

How I Made My Career Resilient

Once the initial shock was absorbed, and after adopting a growth mindset (more out of necessity than voluntarily at that time), I got back on my feet and met a career management counsellor, and I meticulously followed her recommendations.

1. I updated my résumé and my LinkedIn profile

I often had the perception that those who keep their résumés up to date were insecure or were constantly looking for a new job. I figured at that time that they simply were better ready to face adversity. Since then, I’ve ensured that my documents are always up to date, and I practiced to better explain who I am, and what my successes and aspirations were.

2. I started developing my network

Since my LinkedIn profile was up to date, I might as well use it. I started connecting with recruiters from all walks of life, and I was immediately invited to a few interviews. I still have very interesting relationships with some of the people I met at that time when I started being active on this media.

3. I started caring about my aspirations

I basically started listening more to what I aspired for than what the market was offering me. In my former work, what I preferred was management and the Agile mindset. By putting the two together, I decided to take my Scrum Master certification. I was opening myself to new experiences, which is the first step out of fragility.

Using my network, I ended up finding a place that was ready to give me a chance to prove myself in this very in demand world of Scrum Masters.

My career had become resilient

I had connected with many Scrum Masters, keeping in mind that what happened a few months back could happen again. I was keeping my résumé and my LinkedIn profile updated and was working really hard to keep my network healthy. While I wasn’t necessarily ready for anything, I had a better understanding of the fact that chaos and adversity aren’t exceptions, they are the norm.

As a matter of fact, one year later, the guillotine fell again on my job. For reasons out of my control, I have to part ways from my employer. There were no tears this time, no feeling of betrayal. I was disappointed, but I also felt a feeling of peace, serenity, and even some excitement. My network was strong, my stuff was up to date. I would find another job, simply. I could do it a year before, and I had much fewer things care for, so I started looking immediately.

While I was surprised by this news, it didn’t create a tsunami, not even a single wave, and it didn’t affect my morale. My career had just resisted to a great potential stress. My career was now robust.

How I made my career antifragile

Since I was ready, I had a strong network and I knew what to do, I was able to find another job in a matter of weeks. In this new organization, I felt a work environment that was open and trustworthy. I felt safe enough to grow. It was a very fertile ground to experiment, and, more or less consciously, make my career antifragile. Here’s how it went.

1. I found my vocation

It doesn’t happen in one day. It took me about one year to understand why I was getting up and going to work every morning. On the days where I felt useful and valued, I would take time to understand why, and find the common denominator. In the end, it was rather simple: I was feeling good every time I helped someone take ownership of their job, their career. When I was helping them to make their job more human. This is how I found my vocation: to bring people back as the core of the work world.

If you want to know more on how I found my “why”, I recommend that you read my article Why You Should Focus On Your Why?

2. I invested energy in making myself known

As my network was getting stronger, thanks to LinkedIn, I started connecting with people who believed what I believed. I soaked my brain with dozens of concepts that were supporting my beliefs, and I was sharing them daily on social medias.

I also began to go attend various meetups and conferences. At first, it was to learn new things, but eventually, I figured it was a very efficient way to network with people of influence. I discovered it was worth the shot to stay after speeches and workshops and discuss with the speakers and facilitators. They proved to be great allies. Today, I even have a partnership with one of them.

3. I spent time developing my leadership skills

I was already a strong servant leader. As a Scrum Master, it was my role to go to people and ask them “What do you need? How can I help?”. I cared deeply for the success of my teams.

After meeting with Maurice Lefebvre, who would become my professional coach for a while, I explored many forms of leadership. I learned to be an everyman leader, by observing people and finding opportunities to help. Sometimes, I would open new doors to create contexts where I could be of service to people, be it only for a few minutes, to show them something, send them a video, lend them a book.

With time, by developing and crystalizing my personal beliefs, and by taking ownership of my own discourse on the humanity (or lack thereof) of the work world, I became the figurehead of my cause. The figurehead is a leadership role that one can reach by being completely passionate by a cause, an organization or a product.

For more information on these three leadership roles, read this article written by Maurice: Of the 3 Leader Roles, Which One Are You Perfect For?

4. I learned to get out of my comfort zone

By getting out of my comfort zone, I was also making my comfort zone bigger with time. I developed a curiosity for things that would scare me in the past or embarrass me because I didn’t know how to approach them. I gave myself the possibility to be human, to screw up, thinking that I would at least have tried new things and that I would learn from my mistakes.

At this moment, I started challenging authorities. Something I wouldn’t have done in the past, as I was afraid to create waves. I also volunteered to speak at conferences, even though I’m much more efficient in smaller groups of 2 or 3 people. When offered to do something I never tried before, I was now jumping at the chance to learn something new. The growth mindset was now my permanent mindset.

5. I started making short, controlled experimentations

This is very much linked to the previous point. By getting out of my comfort zone, I was also making sure I was only making short and controlled experimentations. When trying something new, I was ready to put a stop to it at any time, and even go back to the previous state, if the experimentation was infructuous.

For instance, I once rewrote my entire LinkedIn profile to see how my audience would react, and if I would stop receiving job offers in fields that I considered to be part of my past rather than of my future. The time I talked about the necessity of a survey about the relationship between managers and employees, I simply decided to create it myself. It gave me an interesting experience, and if ever I need to do a study in the future, I would already know what kind of effort it requires.

6. I stopped being a victim

Definitely one of the most significant mindset change I went through. I suffered from a lot of pain points in my career. I wasn’t always directly impacted by the problems, but the fact that no one was doing anything to solve the problems was very hard on me.

At this point, I stopped being a victim and I became an actor of my career. One of my teams is left to fend for itself with no one to take care of them? I improvised myself as their manager and gave them what they needed to be at their best. I have the feeling that the recruitment world is growing more and more inhuman? Then it’s my responsibility to make it more human. I observe many work environments that are toxic? I’ll make sure my work environment is psychologically safe.

When I discovered my vocation, I talked to my then managers. I was clear to me that I would dedicate my time to creating work environments that would be more human and safe for my colleagues, and bring the decision-making power to them. My aspirations were not heard on that day. I simply decided that I’d have to care about people somewhere else then. The era when I’d ask for permission to do what’s right was now behind me. Bygone. Which brings me to the last point.

7. I took the bet to act in accordance with my values

One of the pain points I suffered from in the past was the fact that in my surroundings, many couldn’t live according to their values at work. When personal values conflict with those of the work environment, demotivation and disengagement ensue. I simply wasn’t ready to tolerate that.

My values are important and non-negotiable. They are known by everyone I work with. Can I bend them? Slightly but rarely. Can I ignore them? Absolutely not. This gives me an interesting advantage: I am authentic, and also happy. Even Gandhi approves: “Happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony”.

My career is now antifragile

As of today, the reason why I do things is much more important than what I do. I can be a manager, a Scrum Master, a coach, a facilitator, a director, or whatever. I got much more strings to my bow than it could tolerate in the past.

I helped so many people without asking anything in return, simply because it was the thing to do, that I’m quite confident my network could pay it back to me in time of need if I ever have to part ways with my current workplace. I’m fairly certain I could have something within days.

But in reality, if I was to be without a job, it would be a golden opportunity to devote myself to my vocation and contribute to bringing people back as the heart of businesses. It would be a springboard to my dream of really making a difference in the work world.

In short, being antifragile reminds me of a quite familiar character…

“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine”

– Obi-Wan Kenobi

Olivier Fortier

Owner of Primos Populi, partner and coach at Moabi. As a former manager, I prefer to use a “people first, the rest will follow” kind of approach. My favorite topics are organizational culture, safe work environments, and lowering the center of gravity of the decision making process. I cultivate people’s awesomeness.

www.primospopuli.com

Antifragility is the ability to thrive and prosper in chaos and adversity.

The concept comes from Nassim Nicolas Taleb, author of Black Swans, Antifragile and Fooled by Randomness.

In essence, it means that the ability to weather uncertainty, stress and opposition just isn’t enough. You need to learn to turn chaos and adversity into opportunity.

As someone who always has… “lived in interesting times”, the concept appeals to me at a visceral level. A serial entrepreneur and someone infinitely curious, I often gambled with large swaths of my life, many a time to my loss. Over time I learned to reduce the risks in my experiments. I found out that I now can do a lot more of them, and now and then one pays off, sometimes in unexpected ways. I have now far more options in my life than ever before.

This blog post is meant to be a quick introduction to the general concept of Antifragility and a couple of tricks to get you started. We are starting a journey here. Take your first step.

Fragile, Robust and Antifragile in a nutshell

It’s simple really.

Still, let’s go in a bit more details:

Fragile systems are optimized for efficiency and performance. In a stable and constant environment, they are usually the ones who will deliver the most value in the shortest time. However, they will fail quickly under stress, especially stress that is of a different nature what it is originally built to deal with. Race cars are a good example of a fragile system: unparalleled performances, but take them out of the controlled environment of the racetrack, and it will fall apart in minutes. Even of the racetrack, few cars can finish a single race without a pit stop.

Resilient systems are designed to withstand stress and punishment. A good resilient system will not get weaker or stronger from adversity; it will simply ignore it. Farm equipment is a good example of resiliency: it is build to work in all kinds of conditions and sturdy enough, so it won’t break miles away from the closest repair shop.

Antifragile systems are designed to improve with stress. They are not as tough as resilient systems or can’t reach peak efficiency like fragile systems, but they will grow and adapt where the two other strategies simply can’t. The human body is a good example of an antifragile system: our body builds muscles and reflexes through the stress of training, our mind gets better at making connections the more we learn.

Becoming Antifragile

“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates and a monthly salary.”
– Nassim Nicolas Taleb

Here are a few tricks to get you started.

Never put all your eggs in the same basket

A specialty is always in danger of being inappropriate in a given situation or worse, becoming irrelevant.

As a person or a company, invest in a range of options. Become good at several things, cater to several markets. Diversification is one of the keys to antifragility. It gives you options. If you have several options it is doubtful they will all fail you at the same time, giving you something to fall back on.

Be careful about over-diversifying however. Diversity comes at the cost of high performance. If you take skills as an example, having a few highly specialized skills will net you the most income when they are useful, while several general ones will grant you something to fall back on.

Make small bets, but make dozens of them

All or nothing is just stupid. Yes, you can win big, but chances are that you will lose big. “Never put all your eggs in the same basket,” right?

Everyone and everything has a threshold of tolerance. Budget, the capacity to take on work or resistance to pressure. Find the threshold, and keep your experiments below it.

Follow your guts

Your instinct is the result of your brain analyzing far more inputs and cross-referencing with memories than your conscious mind can handle. It doesn’t mean your instinct is right, but it does mean that you should pay attention to it. Instincts will probably not steer you toward the most optimal scenario, but it will help you avoid the worst one.

Over millennia, we figured out that our instincts were not enough and so we develop logic to help us analyze our surroundings and decide on the best course of action. While a powerful tool, it is a dangerous one. Afraid of mistakes, we tend to rely way too much on it and end up rationalizing. You rationalize when you try to convince yourself of a course of action that you know isn’t good.

Don’t hope for the best, prepare for the worst

In clear, do not try to visualize all the good that can come to you to gather the courage to act. Try to picture the worst possible outcomes and actively prepare for it.

Do not trick your fear into going away. Fear is your friend. It is a good defense mechanism, one that’s telling you when something’s not right. Instead, do what’s need to be done to assuage your fear.

Take the Via Negativa

The Roman poet Ennius said, “the good is mostly in the absence of the bad”.

Doing something good is difficult but removing bad things will bring you closer to your goal than large drastic actions that can cause useless risks. As an example, instead of taking on a drastic diet, start by reducing carbs and fried food while increasing the variety of food you eat. It’s much easier to do and to maintain, and it will net you positive results without risking becoming ill from the diet.

Striving for good focus you on the result, blinding you to the real dangers you will face while getting there. Remove those dangers while knowing where good is and you’ll move toward it much more naturally and in a much safer way.

Do SOMETHING and do it NOW

Don’t waste time and opportunity waiting for a right time that will probably never come. Only large, risky undertakings are worth waiting the right time for. And by that, I mean waiting forever and instead to do something more manageable and constructive.

Take action and try something now, all the while keeping the other rules in mind: diversify, make numerous small bets, use gut feeling, remove the bad, prepare for the worst.

Now that you know where we’re going…

Take a look at yourself and your workplace. Can you identify fragile, robust and antifragile systems around you?

Can you improve aspects of yourself and your environment simply by using the Via Negativa and removing bad processes, or habits?

Can you identify within you, or your business, what are your specialties? Are you a generalist in other areas, at least at a high enough level to use these areas as a fall back if need be?

Get used to these kinds of questions. On the path of becoming antifragile, they will follow you, always.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

During a coaching session a few weeks ago I was asked by a client about the advantages of keeping teams together in an Agile setting. After all, they used to build teams to order for each projects and it was working fine. Building teams for specific small projects and disbanding them afterward seemed like the most efficient way to go, as it meant that all specialists were exactly where they needed to be at exactly the right time.

This question is tricky to answer. Of course the client is right: in a very narrow view, he uses is ressources far more efficiently that way. But he’s also completely wrong, as the short-term gain of efficiency comes at the expense of long-term gains and of the overall strength of his entire system.

The answer is also not necessarily to keep teams completely stable over time, but to understand the “why” and “how” to change team members.

The Issue with Efficient, Predictable Teams

Business and production in the 20th century was marked by a continual quest for two elements: efficiency and predictability. From Taylor’s “Scientific management” to Lean Manufacturing, most of the proposed approaches have likened companies to machines that can be precise and predictable.

Predictability is desired in order to to plan from months to years in advance with little variance. Estimation experts either skim or use complex algorithms to calculate risk in their estimations, with results that are now increasingly off target. Predictability requires a very stable market, a very stable environment, and only “expected” unexpected events. As we try to predict over many years, we leave the realm of predictability for sheer divination.

Efficiency is desired to increase the output while reducing the waste. To be efficient, one needs to create a well-oiled machine, with all steps carefully planned and tweaked. It is much more achievable than a reliable form of long term predictability, but throw a wrench in that well-oiled machine and the the whole system will be blocked, if not damaged. Efficiency also requires a great deal of stability in the work flow, the market, the technologies involved and the corporate environment. Volatility and uncertainty are the worst enemies of an efficient system, as efficient systems are not meant to deal with significant variance. In effect, as a system moves towards efficiency, it also becomes increasingly fragile.

Entropy is the direct result of adding complexity to a system, such as new features or quickly patching defects. Increased entropy mean increased fragility. The more complexity you add to a system, the closer you bring it to the breaking point.

Non-Agile teams are created to deliver something specific in an efficient manner, often to be disbanded afterwards. Team members’ time is precisely managed using Gantt charts. Even estimated variation is accounted for and planned. Matrix planning allows for each person to be part of multiple teams with specific time allocation for each. It looks good on reports, but emerging problems causes variations, and there’s rarely a shortage of problems. Teams, and the systems they are working on, rarely seems to improve with time but rather accumulate entropy in the form of a backlog of work, defects, etc..

From Fragile Teams to Resilient Teams

New teams are always fragile, wether they are Agile of not. Agile teams however benefit from several advantages that makes them a bit more robust from the get-go.

Agile teams have a stable core of dedicated cross-functional individuals. They are not only systems, but networked systems. Their strength comes from the criss-crossing of diverse types of relationships within the teams — personal relationships, skill redundancy, information sharing and team self-organization. The balance between these relationships is whats make them complex organic systems.

However, even Agile teams start fragile. Growing them toward resilience require following the four Modern Agile principles:

Safety as a Prerequisite is achieved by creating a blameless team environment through shared accountability of work, group problem-solving, frequent synching and the all important right to fail. As Seth Godin argues, people are not afraid of failure, they are afraid of blame.

Learning Rapidly is achieved by spreading knowledge in the team through paired work and mentoring as well as small, controlled experiments. An Agile team uses a short learning loop to absorb new information and update their knowledge constantly.

Delivering value continuously, or in small batches, reduces the team’s overall risk by insuring that no matter what happens (budget cuts, human error or disaster), completed work is already out there bringing value to the company, client or customer.

Make people awesome is achieved in large part by the results of Safety as a Prerequisite and Learning Rapidly. Safety, experience-based knowledge and confidence empower people to go out of the beaten path without fear of reprisal. They will be able to absorb stress into their system, and be more willing to adopt new ideas. They will grow faster, improve faster and just be plain more awesome at their job.

Funny thing is, these teams will reach some form of predictability and efficiency, but from a completely different route than teams that are assembled to be an efficient system. It’s the combination of several traits that are not seen as efficient that brings them there: redundancy of skills, the collaborative approach, absence of fear, experimentation. By using non efficient practices, they end up more efficient.

When that point is reached, the team is already resilient. It will be able to withstand a lot of challenges, adapt to change and face both uncertainty and volatility. The team is not invincible though: very high levels of stress (such as changing several team members simultaneously) will make it crack.

From Resilient Teams to Antifragile Teams

Resilient teams are able to accept stress without being bothered by it too much. It’s good, but it can be better. Agile teams have all the building blocks necessary to progress from resilience to antifragility, so let’s put them to work.

Antifragility is the ability to take up a lot of stress, and become stronger as a result, like building muscles. Taleb uses the hydra as an analogy: a multi-headed monster that grows two more heads every time one is cut off.

The short learning loop of Agile teams is the key. The use of practices such as retrospective meetings allow teams to capitalize on that short learning loop: problems and challenges can be seen as new opportunities to grow. These challenges and stress are beginning to make the team stronger — or Antifragile. In order to convert stress into growth, a team needs to become comfortable with these short learning loops.

An antifragile team needs stress to continue to perform. Anyone who trains at a gym or does physical work for a while and then suddenly stops for an extended period of time will notice that the body will quickly lose its newfound strength if it is not used regularly. When not exercised through stress, the antifragile team stops growing.

This is where the Experiment & Learn Rapidly principle of Modern Agile truly comes into play. By conducting small, controlled experiments that are not too risky, teams can try and explore new ideas, keep themselves stimulated and create more challenges.

Introducing a rotation of team members is another way of adding some healthy stress. Changing one team member at a time, and then letting the team recuperate by spreading team expertise to the new member and absorbing the new perspective brought by the newcomer will make the team stronger. The departing team member will help another team by spreading his expertise and getting pollinated by his new environment.

The trick to this evolution through stress is pacing. If you do it too rarely, the teams will stagnate or regress. If you do it too often, however, the trauma might become too much and prevent them from reacting to unexpected large amount of stress.

Just The Beginning

Agile Teams are relatively easy systems to bring toward antifragility, because of their very makeup. It takes time and conscious efforts to grow them that way, but it is well worth the effort.

Other kinds of systems can benefit from antifragility. After all, what is the benefit of having antifragile teams in a company that cannot survive in a volatile and uncertain environment? Of course making a whole company antifragile brings a whole new set of challenges. In further posts we will explore how to bring those larger, and more complex systems along the same path.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca