Antifragile

We’ve been interested in Nassim Taleb’s concept of antifragile for some time. He describes the concept as systems taht benefit from volatility, randomness, disorder, and similar perturbations.If you are unfamiliar with antifragile concepts, read the Wikipedia summary.

We think this is a concept that corporate IT should strive for, not just in theory, but to proactively lower risk, ensure customer delivery, and being faster to respond to customer needs.

Most corporate technology ecosystems are at the other end of the spectrum. They’re fragile, they’re brittele, they don’t stand up to changes, variations, needs for continual enhancements, and needs for integration. While very recent changes to organizations necessitated by the Coronavirus represent one perturbation, change and the necessity of reacting quickly never really abates.

The mantras of “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” and “just get the project done and move onto something else” never address the needs of usability and true quality. Many organizations with limited amounts of time and resources still operate with a project selection triage mentality.

For the desire and pressure to move at innovation speed, incorporate machine learning, and other needs, we still see big gaps in outcomes, and a tolerance of perpertuating the status quo.