Are You Thinking About Antifragility Yet?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Agile   Risk Management  

The concept of antifragility was first proposed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2012 book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. In recent years, it has become increasingly recognized as an important strategy in modern business.

To be overly simplistic, it is the idea that organizations can benefit and strengthen as a result of volatility. Instead of seeking to be robust as a business and resist disruption—or resilient and be able to recover from such disruption quickly—it encourages embracing disruption as a way to improve performance.

This sounds counterintuitive, but in the project world it is something that happens fairly regularly, if only on a small scale. Project teams are often faced with multiple changes, with challenges during project delivery, with high degrees of uncertainty over requirements or approach, and so on. While any one of these issues could derail a team, the much more common outcome is that collaborating to solve these problems helps the team to become more productive—and for the solution that is ultimately delivered to be better able to enable the required benefits.

But how do organizations take that idea of antifragility, which happens as part of how effective project teams operate, and turn it into an explicit strategy they can leverage to actively pursue higher levels of performance? Can business leaders even be …

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