Which is more robust, a city bike or a Mercedes-Benz? The key concept of 'Antifragility'.
Hello. This is Mamotaro from the General Affairs Section of the General Affairs Department.
This is an introduction to the key concept of "Antifragility" from [Philosophy as a Weapon].
Antifragility refers to the property of "improving performance as a result of disturbances or pressure."
Is the concept opposite to fragile really robustness?
Antifragility is a key concept proposed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960–). Taleb says the following:
Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. This property is behind everything that has changed with time: evolution, culture, ideas, revolutions, political systems, technological innovation, cultural and economic success, corporate survival, good recipes (say, chicken soup or steak tartare with a drop of cognac), the rise of cities, cultures, legal systems, equatorial forests, bacterial resistance, etc. Even the existence of humanity as a species on this planet is the same. And the difference between living, organic, complex things like the human body and inanimate things like a stapler on a desk is whether or not they have antifragility.
The author, Shu Yamaguchi, uses examples such as "a carpenter with a trade" versus "a generalist at a major general contractor," and "a city bike" versus "a Mercedes-Benz S-Class," to argue that things that appear robust at first glance are predicated on "a state where the system is functioning normally," and that in abnormal states (such as recessions or disasters), they can actually be fragile.
Even in information systems, if the specifications of an internal system are too rigid, it may be a good system under normal conditions, but it may not be able to cope with changes in society or changes in company policy. In human resources and general affairs, we try to create various regulations and personnel evaluations as precisely as possible, but these are often based on the status quo, and conversely, they can become weak in the face of change.
In one's career, it feels correct to increase productivity by enhancing expertise in one's current profession. However, that is only on the condition that the profession will continue to exist in the future.
Many things are based on some kind of "premise." Perhaps you cannot even begin without a premise. However, this premise may not be eternal. The robustness you pursue for the best of reasons may actually be fragile.
I believe the key concept of antifragility provides deep insights into various things, including products, systems, organizations, and careers. In particular, if you exclude the perspective of antifragility from human resources and general affairs measures, you might end up creating an organization that is fragile to change.
This antifragility has also given me a new perspective.
Why don't you take a moment to think about it as well?
Thank you for reading.
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