Episode #6 - What is the opposite of fragile?
My takeon the utility of Nassim Taleb's concept of antifragility. It's the last sense making framework bother you with, I promise.
Ed update: For those of you traumatized by Ep 5, my apologies again. I am “on the mend” as they say, though with neurological conditions, it doesn’t look all that different from day to day. I am operating at about 70% physically, the main deficiencies at this point being lack of sensation in the extremities, lack of fine motor control (still no chopsticks for Ed), and unpredictable stamina. I go to OT, PT, doctors’ visits, and take a load of pills that are supposed to help me get better faster. It seems to be working. I went to my first MCN conference since before the pandemic and had an amazing time. I did have to spend two solid days recovering from it, but I call it a success!
Once I was able to operate my laptop again, I picked where I’d left off pre-accident, which was thinking about tools and mindsets to help organizations confront the realities of the 21st century and adapt to them. I’ve already talked about the Cynefin and BANI frameworks in previous episodes and how they can help us understand where we are, and how we perceive where we are. Today I want to tie it all up with a theoretical bow because I feel like I’ve found the missing piece that I was looking for, antifragility.
Antifragile
You may not have heard of Nassim Taleb, but you’ve heard of Taleb’s work. He wrote the book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” in 2007 right before the financial crisis, and now “black swan events” have entered the common parlance. In 2012, Taleb followed that up with “Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder”. It’s a tough read, for reasons I will get into later,but here are some of the concepts in Antifragile I found most interesting and useful.
Changing How We Think About Stress
Taleb breaks down organizations into three kinds: fragile ones that break under pressure; robust ones that resist pressure, but don’t adapt to it, and; antifragile ones that grow and improve from pressure. Or as Taleb says, “Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.” What Taleb calls antifragile is something that grows more powerful as a result of being stressed. A central theme of the book is that chaos and uncertainty are unavoidable stresses. You can run, but you can’t hide. Antifragile offers a path forward that asks what if we think about stress not as a thing to be avoided but rather as something to harness? <Insert exploding head emoji>
Taleb argues pretty convincingly that exposure to small, frequent stressors is necessary to become stronger, a process he calls “hormesis”. Gradual exposure to volatility strengthens the organization and allows it to tolerate more stress in the future. Kinda like exercise. Building muscle mass mass is all about the repetitions.
Why Less Really is More
Book VI (yes, it’s THAT kind of book) of Antifragile is all about via negativa “the negative way” and the idea that less really is more. I have said for some time that museums are great at additive change, but they suck at subtractive change. Taleb posits embracing via negativa as an essential part of becoming more antifragile. “The road to robustness is via negativa—not by addition but by subtraction.” Embracing via negativa means strengthening your institution by removing what doesn’t serve your mission or your visitors. Retire outdated programs that no longer meet audience needs. Simplify approval processes that slow experimentation. Say “no” to projects that drain staff energy without deepening impact.
Optionality
Taleb argues that antifragile systems prioritize maintaining their flexibility and pursue multiple options for how to proceed. This positions them to capitalize on random opportunities instead of relying on prediction and picking a single winner. If you have six small bets spread across the board, one of them is more likely to hit than putting all your hopes on one bet. Throughout the book, Taleb hammers away on the preferability of experimentation and adaptability over rigid planning. Maintaining a portfolio of small, reversible experiments allows you to capture potential opportunities without risking a catastrophic event destroying your one option.
Sounds great, right? Where this gets hard is where it runs into the neoliberal late stage capitalist era we find ourselves in, where seeking efficiency has become the be-all and end-all for too many organizations. We’ve all heard leaders telling their staffs that they have to do more with less, and become leaner. Well, I don’t think there’s much left to cut, but the pursuit of ever diminishing efficiency gains continue to drive lot of strategic planning. This is an antipattern for antifragility, because optionality is not efficient, it’s deliberately wasteful of resources. Experiments will fail, and that time and resource investment will not be recoverable. For Taleb, the key is in looking at the total resource allocation of an organization, and making sure that you are keeping the bulk of it in safe, proven options, which takes us to the next point.
The Barbell Strategy
One of my favorite parts of Antifragile is Taleb’s concept of the barbell strategy. Imagine a set of barbells with a weight plate on the left side, another on the right side, and a long bar connecting them. The left side represents extreme caution, the right side represents high risk, high reward experiments, and the bar represents moderate risk, the “this is just what we do” middle ground where Taleb argues that fragility tends to accumulate. This is the place where via negativa can fruitfully improve operations.
The barbell strategy represents a practical way to leverage uncertainty: Put most of your resources in extremely safe options. Use a small portion of your resources for high-risk, high-reward experiments to encourage optionality. The barbell strategy meshes with both via negativa and optionality to provide a model for how you might reorganize to be more antifragile. Remove the cruft, double down on what’s working, and hatch a bunch of small experiments that might point the way towards progress towards the organization’s goals.
Skin in the Game
Taleb directs a lot of fire at leaders who make choices that won’t affect them one way or the other. Think of the bankers and stock market folks who caused a global financial crisis and largely escaped any direct negative consequence. Taleb thinks that in an antifragile organization, decision makers have to share in the risks and rewards of their decisions and its that accountability that aligns incentives with overall health of the organization. People or systems that bear the consequences of their decisions tend to behave more wisely. Having lived through my share of bosses coming to me with new projects and saying some version of "I know this sounds stupid but…", before giving me some new project, skin in the game really resonated with me.
Read it if you dare
Taleb has gotten a lot of heat for this book and I won’t lie, it’s a tough read. I continually felt like I was listening to someone really smart rant about everybody they felt were idiots as they described a very interesting concept and ideas for usefully applying it to decision-making. Taleb labels more traditional voices as “fragilistas”, and lambastes “The Soviet-Harvard complex” of academic theorists with their top-down, theory-driven plans and belief that complex systems can be understood, predicted, and optimized by experts armed with models and data. And while he's often not wrong about what he critiques, it makes for really tough going as a reader. I’ve rarely been so conflicted about a book, but I think its strengths are such that antifragility remains a useful tool for us to add to our kit.
What’s Next?
I feel like I'm at a point now where I can articulate a methodology that integrates antifragility with BANI and Cynefin, and it feels like it could be a robust tool for organizational transformation. I'm doing a museum next session with old friends, Hillary Spencer and Jenn Foley so it'll be a good opportunity to test drive the idea.
An aside. When I was sharing Taleb’s definition of antifragility to my English teacher wife, she said “What you just said is not the opposite of fragile.” And she’s not wrong. The opposite of fragile is strong, or robust. I can’t find an English word that captures that, so I indulged in the time-honored English tradition of plundering the Classical languages to coin the word I needed. And given his love of quoting Classical authors, I'm surprised Taleb didn't do so himself. Rather than antifragile, I prefer the word piezocratic meaning “gaining power through pressure” combining piezo (from πιέζω “to press, squeeze”) + cratic (from κρατύνω “to strengthen, make powerful”).
I couldn't help it.I am hopelessly in love with language. I own a complete set of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (which weighs down an entire shelf of a bookcase) mainly for its detailed etymologies. And I can trace this love straight back to my high school Greek teacher, Mr. Donaher. I went to a Jesuit high school in the days when four years of Greek or Latin were required. My older brother told me the priest who taught freshman Latin (commonly known as “The Skull”) was hard and mean, so I opted for Greek, and spent three years learning to love languages with Mr. Donaher. The Skull, it turned out, taught both freshman Latin and freshman Greek. Oh well.
After surviving the Skull, I got to Mr. Donaher’s class. He was the first true polyglot I’d ever met. He spoke everything it seemed. Where another teacher dealing with an irregular third declension noun like ναῦς (“ship”) might just work on drilling the correct answers into us, Mr. Donaher would lead us on a trip back into Archaic Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Proto Indo-European as he attempted to show us how that word began, and then forward and across into Latin, English, German, and a smattering of Romance languages to show how it morphed over the millennia.
Mr. Donaher was a tireless cheerleader for understanding Greek as a means of better understanding English and just understanding. He delighted in torturing us to define English words and then demonstrating their Greek roots. And it rubbed off on me. Once you know that hyperbole in Greek meant “a mountain pass” or more literally “an over throw” you never look at that word the same way.
So, thanks, Mr. Donaher, for that gift. I don’t think I’ll mount a campaign to replace antifragile with piezocratic, given Taleb’s well-established prickliness, but I will always think of one when I hear the other.