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

Please keep in mind that I’m not advocating the use of these tools above the ones you might currently be using. I am not disparaging any other tools either. Context is everything, and the right tool to use will depend on that context.

Modern Agile

Agility has been around for a bit over 15 years now. Modern Agile, presented by Industrial Logic’s CEO Joshua Kerievsky, acknowledges what has been done in the field in that time and the lessons that were learned. It moves away from frameworks, roles and artifacts to bring back agility to four principles to act as True North; the direction we should strive to keep.

Make People Awesome: “People” includes customers (yes, YOU have to make THEM awesome), employees, managers, clients. When you aim to make people awesome they will want to work with you or for you, and stay.

Make Safety a Prerequisite: Safety is the foundation on which everything else can be build. We protect people’s time, information, reputation, money, health and relationships. Without Safety people don’t dare to experiment, take any kind of risk or speak up against problems.

Learn & Experiment Rapidly: This is a combination of Classic Agile’s Continuous Improvement and of Lean Startup’s short experimentation loop. Making it safe to fail is a prerequisite here. Small, controlled experiments will help you learn fast at the cost of very little risk.

Deliver Value Continuously: To make people safe or awesome, value needs to be available for consumption. It is not about scaling up anymore, it is about rethinking how we architecture work so we can scale OUT, and deliver value continuously from everywhere without having to deal with dependences. The faster you deliver and the smaller your deliveries, the smaller the risks taken.

Because they are very high-level, those four principles can be applied to different domains from different industry. The goal of this approach is to foster a better culture and guide agility across the whole organization.

For more about Modern Agile see www.modernagile.org.

VUCA

The world is not only accelerating: it becomes more complex and far less predictable than ever before. That is why Context & Situational Awareness are essential survival skills to have. You need to know where you stand and understand what is happening around you.The changes are constant, so your efforts to understand your context should be constant as well.

VUCA (for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) is a technique developed by the US military to quickly make sense of any given situation. It helps soldiers figure out how much of a situation they might not understand as well as how fast and drastically that situation can change. It is a handy technique to master when everything around you can quite literally blow up in your face.

The VUCA approach has since been adopted in diplomacy and business. A high VUCA world is now seen as the “new normal” and that new reality is well represented in Quantum Monkey’s trainings.

Antifragility

In his book Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb suggests that the opposite of fragility is not resilience but antifragility.

In a nutshell, a system that is damaged by stress is fragile. A system that is not bothered too much by stress is resilient. A system that thrives and grows from stress is antifragile. The quest for efficiency and predictability has led us to fragile systems and a lot of self-delusion. We suggest that rather than trying to predict variability, let us make sure we can survive and benefit from the unexpected.

Again, the reflex of so many companies is to scale up, which creates more and more fragility by adding steps and work dependancies. It is trying to solve a tower’s instability by adding more, wider floors on top of the existing ones.

The key steps to resilience are relearning how to organize effort to scale out, removing system dependencies, partitioning work in much smaller independent doses and making sure one group’s problems do not contaminate others. Antifragility goes one step further by adding short learning loops and a strategy for constant, relentless improvements across the board.

Networked Organisms

In The connected company, Dave Gray brings the notion that complex systems should not be seen and designed as machines (efficient but prone to obsolescence and too complex to truly be controlled), but rather as networked organisms or ecosystems, to be grown and guided rather than controlled.

He presents Podularity, an organizational model that uses the notion of platforms to grant more leeway to connected groups and to enable a true form of distributed leadership without compromising the company’s safety

Platforms bring tools, services, expectations and boundaries in one system. Smaller systems (such as teams), called pods, can adopt the platform and are free to self-organize independently within the boundaries set by the platform. This grants a lot of freedom to these pods while controlling the risks. The learning done by any of these pods can improve the platform to the benefit of all. Even the catastrophic failure of a pod will positively improve the platform rather than contaminate other pods.

Not only does this approach help bring antifragility to a large organism (like a whole division or an entire company), but it can also be implemented at a small scale first and spread progressively across the organization.

Triadic Relationships and Networked Leadership

The Triadic Relationships of Tribal Leadership is a great approach to create those networked connections and balance relationships and the spread of information by making relations and conversations three-way rather than two-way affairs. It makes systems more resilient by improving transparency. It also fosters safety and fast learning, two key elements in making people awesome. Awesome people form into awesome groups, or tribes, that have a better attitude and can accomplish a lot more. The role of a leader is to create other leaders, and networks of leaders across the organization. By doing that, they create a widely distributed system of decision-making that is faster and better by virtue of being closer to the problem, and still be accomplished by trusted people.

The saying “too many chiefs and not enough indians” does not apply here. A leader is not a boss: the former empowers others while the latter concentrates power. A bellhop can be a leader even if he has no one to lead but himself: all that is required is initiative and reliability, an inquisitive and open mind, trust and trustworthiness as well as the desire to make others reach their potential.

Where to Go From Here

Networked relationships & systems, situational awareness, experimenting & growing from challenges, distributed leadership, safety: these ideas are not new, but they matter now more than ever.

If you want to experiment with these ideas, do not hesitate. Most of these concepts are high level and you can explore them within your context with little effort and little risk, as long as you follow the Learn & Experiment Rapidly principle: small scale, well-defined experiments with clear goals within a limited time frame.

For larger experiment or organizational transformations, make sure to talk to a professional first. A bit of planning can go a long way to ensure success and reduce risk, stress and trauma on a system.

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