Anti-Fragility Services
The words of the German philosopher Nietzsche, "What does not destroy me makes me stronger," encapsulate anti-fragility.
Management has awakened to the consequences and costs of so-called tail events and resolve to build up resilience to what they now assume to be inevitable future occurrences. Based of Taleb's view of organisations and systems potentially being fragile, meaning easily damaged by shocks; robust, able to withstand adversity; or anti-fragile, able to adapt and strengthen "like biological systems" and "actually improve their resilience through being stressed." Bendell aims to teach and encourage the adaption of businesses to changing times and environments.
The concept of anti-fragility is a focus on coherence or unification that has been overlooked previously. It's all about thinking about hierarchies of risk in a way that hasn't been widely spoken about before.
Professor Bendell finds a black swan in the wild, unable to get answers; was unpredictable.
Anti-Fragility at its core is due to former hedge fund manager and mathematics professor, Nassim Nicholas Taleb; a name in which most business professionals will be aware of not only because of his exploits betting against the financial collapse in the United States of America but also because of his best selling books and popular technical papers.
Because of his popularity and the meteoric rise of Anti-Fragility in business, it has been successfully applied into Risk Analysis, Physics, Molecular Biology, Transportation Planning, Engineering, Aerospace, and Computer Science, amongst others. Anti-Fragility has a place in any business wishing not to fail.
We live in unpredictable times, now more so than ever; giving Taleb’s ‘Black Swan’ approach even more credibility. A Black Swan is something unpredictable that could cause a business to fail, these Black Swans could be Brexit, North Korea, and Donald Trump all of which have varying levels of unpredictability. However, these aren’t the only Black Swans a company should be looking for.
Anti-Fragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. Does your organisation have an Anti-Fragility strategy? If not, Professor Tony Bendell of the Anti-Fragility Academy is here to help.
Organisations and systems may be Fragile, Robust or Anti-Fragile.
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Fragile refers to systems and organisations that can be easily damaged by changes or shocks in the external or internal environment.
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Robust refers to systems and organisations that are able to withstand such adverse conditions.
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Anti-Fragile refers to systems and organisations that, like biological systems, are more than just robust and within limits actually improve their resilience through being stressed.
Anti-Fragility is a new way of thinking about mitigating risk. With this view, to find out about risk avoidance, mitigation and management in human systems we focus on the analogous characteristics of biological systems that, being more than just robust, actually improve their resilience through being stressed.
Applying this concept to the development and management of organisations, systems, services, and products of all types, allows us to identify the characteristics of these that will not only mitigate against the realisation of hazards but will enable growth in protection over time.
