Why Antifragility?

COVID-19 has taught us that agility and resilience are not the only capabilities that organizations needed to survive “yesterday”; they also needed antifragility. Those that had that trait did better during the initial crisis. 

Antifragility can best be described as the ability to thrive as a direct result of stressors, shocks, attacks, or failures. The concept was first described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Taleb offers this definition:

“Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness.
The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.” 

To develop antifragility requires first and foremost reframing the employee proposition. This starts with focusing on all factors that define the employee value proposition, including compensation and rewards, development and advancement opportunities, and work environments. As we navigate through the many COVID-19 challenges, people will remember how their employer treated them during this time. Those companies that prioritized their employees will be rewarded by retention. Those companies that wrestled with their values and lost, will pay a long-term price. 

Culture

Culture drives business performance when it is aligned with strategy and the business environment. Yes, everybody knows “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast”! 

But culture can be hard to understand and talk about, much less manage, because it feels elusive. So much of culture is anchored in unspoken behaviors, mindsets and social patterns. What we don’t seem to understand is that culture is an emergent property of structure. Most leaders don’t understand that their organizational culture is driven by its structure.

In other words, “Structure eats culture for lunch”! 

Creating an Antifragile Culture 

Corporate culture remains a source of disruption for most organizations, affected on a daily basis by employees’ family life, politics, economy, religion, and workplace interactions. Despite this, many organizations hold rigid expectations for behavior and assumptions about work-life – a standard that leaves them fragile and vulnerable to change.

What if we could craft an organization that reacted positively to (cultural) change? Instead of being focused on maintaining consistency, it would thrive on continual learning, mindfulness, and adaptation. It would experience all the benefits of a stable workforce plus the addition of continual improvement. Innovation, skills, and mastery would follow, as would service performance, product quality, and client relationships. 

Below I have listed some of the elements related to antifragility. This is only a starting point, but even a little progress toward antifragility will yield great benefits. 

1. Adaptive Team Metrics

Goal setting is values-aligned but decentralized. 

Grant teams enough power and resources to define some of their own lead and lag metrics. This is limited in scope to team-specific behaviors and results. By giving them more autonomy, teams can harness change more quickly and effectively. 

Because of the inherent risk in decentralized control, require that team metrics are aligned with corporate strategy, vision, and values. The line-of-sight will help teams understand how to design metrics that feed the larger purpose and strategy of the organization. 

2. Active Listening

Listening is considered more important than control, oversight, or behavior management. 

Adopt the belief that employees are experts and innovators. Build pathways for leadership to solicit input and guidance from them when making broad-sweeping decisions. Information from employees will flow up continually, both through and bypassing managers. 

3. Transparency 

Be as transparent as you can about difficult changes and events.

Take a critical look at what you tend to keep confidential and determine if your motivation for doing so is fear. Take an honest measurement of the risk and if you can share, do. Healthy transparency will make it easier for your employees to trust you during times of change. 

4. Work Out Loud 

Record successes and failures for the future.

Recall these stories frequently to boost morale and discourage negative behaviors, enabling the organization to benefit from a shared memory. 

Summary

Creating an antifragile culture will help turn disruptive change into a positive, productive experience. This is the future of change management, but it is a long-term effort. Any steps you take will yield benefits.