Are You Fragile? Is Your Team Fragile? Are You Going to Wait to Find Out?
How being fragile can stunt growth and what to do about it.
As someone who has been making a serious effort to get back into working out after a few years where work wouldn’t allow it, I can say from experience: Building muscle hurts. For years I avoided things that would leave me achy and sore, but now waking up in the morning to some pain has become a sign that I’m doing something right. It turns out you’re not going to get very far if you don’t make yourself a little uncomfortable.
I was reminded of this truism recently when I picked up Nicholas Taleb’s book Antifragile. Well, at first I thought, “Is Antifragile even a word?”. Turns out it’s not, but as Taleb points out we don’t really have a word for the opposite of fragile. Yeah, I thought resilient too, but to be resilient is to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions. To be fragile is to be easily broken or damaged. How do we, in the first place, not fall victim to even the most difficult conditions — but thrive in them?
Antifragility is a property of systems that increase their capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures.
