By Anton Rossouw.

Some months back I read Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s latest epic tome “Anti-Fragile - Things that gain from disorder” .

I bought the book because I loved his previous two books “Fooled By Randomness” and “The Black Swan”. And his mini poetic diversion “The Bed of Procrustes” is a great diversional romp into the philosophical space.

I have no doubt that he is a brilliant thinker and should be placed close to the top of the Pioneers list of the worlds most influential people (he is not listed yet).

The other person I see as a peer is Dave Snowden. I would love to see a serious philosophical debate between the two of them but suspect it will start in the sphere of massive disagreement and end where they eventually agree on everything !

Diversions aside, I found the book and the concept of Anti-Fragile interesting but challenging.

Perhaps my brain is fragile when it comes to new hard-hitting conceptual arguments like this. I could at first not warm my mind to what Anti-Fragile could mean, and the closest I got was perhaps the words “toughness”, "agility", “resilience", “robustness”, "adaptation" and "evolution" which I was well acquainted with.

I discarded most of those words except Resilience because the other words did not carry enough multi layered meaning to approach Anti-Fragility with.

Resilience also made most sense because I read Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy's book "Resilience - Why Things Bounce Back" directly before I read Anti-Fragile.

I then toyed with trying to understand the antithesis of Anti-Fragile and came with “Anti-Agile” and also for some reason thought of the word “Government”.

As I plowed through the pages it became clear that there was no readily available synonym or close-fit word to describe what Anti-Fragile means. So here follows my summary in the terms of Complex Systems (the living type):

It is a particular property of a Complex System as well as a transitionary condition of becoming.
It is the ability of a Complex System to increase its fitness and become stronger the more it is challenged, exercised and too some extent damaged.
The Complex System can survive a lot of damage and abuse due to impacts from conflicts emerging from the environment it is in, from within, and encountered by other Complex Systems in the competive space.
It is a learning COmplex System that is emotionally charged and energises, and best flourishes when pressure is applied to it.

Reflecting on our Agility, Innovation and Sustainability practice points of view I could not quite understand how Anti-Fragile concepts can be integrated and what we could learn from it, and left it at that in a puzzled state.

Then one night when watching TV, some nature program documentary again, it struck me !

Waterfall projects are Fragile and Scrum projects are Anti-Fragile.

I think the seeds of the emergent thoughts were sown when I spoke to a colleague about Takeuchi and Nonakas' 1986 HBR paper "The New New Product Development Game" (worth a read for some deep insights into Agility) where they explained the difference between an Agile approach and Fragile approach (not their words) as the difference between a rugby team moving forward and gaining ground over a large field as a unit even while being attacked by the opposition, and a relay race where one runner at a time passes the baton on a set track to the next runner, and if one runner drops the baton or stumbles then the race is lost.

A relay team is thus a more fragile system than a scrum team.

So Scrum from an Agile sense as well a rugby team is Anti-Fragile because:

Its a living system compring human agends who move as a team and not as any single individual.
It is adaptive, self organising and self re-organising.
It learns and reforms through iterative engagement.
The more you exercise it the better its performance becomes.

This mindset could also be applied on our organisational systems I suspect. I will find out when I hopefully attend the Nassim Taleb and Yaneer Bar-Yam NECSI executive education session later this year.