Resilient Isn’t Enough: Building an Anti-Fragile Business

Nassim Taleb wrote about the anti-fragile organization. The robust organization that can not only survive disruption, but actually become stronger because of it. It’s the ultimate expression of Nietzsche’s, “if this doesn’t kill us it makes us stronger.” It’s one thing to make a statement like this, because they sound so masculine and powerful. However, it’s challenging to see how one can put these ideas into actual day to day practice.

So let’s take an example: starting a small business. It’s easy to see how a nascent new business is one of the most fragile and ephemeral things in the marketplace (our ecosystem in this case). A new business is not much more than a hypothesis dressed up in fancy clothes. Maybe you have a website, and perhaps a business license and a bank account. But there isn’t much more to it than that. And a bouncing baby business is a hungry, hungry creature. Starved for attention and dollars. Like a newly born baby sea turtle, it ventures out into the business world all large eyes and food for...well, everyone.

And as we all know, the odds aren’t good for our bouncing baby venture. Not good at all. The statistics are grim. We’ll be lucky to make it to our first anniversary out on the high seas of business. So how do we make this fragile thing more robust, more capable of handling shocks and setbacks. How do we ensure that the business survives long enough make a buck or two?

One way is to ensure that we have ample resources to keep it going. If this is our only source of income, any shock that comes along is going to be hard to manage because we will have to rely on our own savings to handle any shortfall or unanticipated expense. That’s a weak position. A much stronger position is to take on a full or part time job and keep the new business as a side hustle until it matures enough to become a reliable full time gig. Now if there is any kind of economic downturn, we aren’t entirely dependent on the nascent business to survive. Instead, we can use our day job to keep things afloat much easier. In fact, you may be able to keep strengthening and improving the “side hustle” while your competitors are dealing with significant setbacks. You have protected yourself from the downside shock and, in fact, you are going to come out of the crisis in a stronger position.

That’s what we want our organizations to do. That’s what Taleb was talking about when he described the anti-fragile organization. It’s an organization that isn’t just resilient, not just surviving the shock, but an organization that is capable of growing because of the shock.

In a world of nonstop disruption, resilience is the minimum. Anti-fragile businesses do something better: they protect the downside and keep investing in the upside while others freeze. That’s the work we do at Disruption Dynamics. If you want to build a business that can take hits and come out stronger, let’s talk.