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The term “antifragility” only became part of our language relatively recently. Introduced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2012 book “Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder”, antifragility is much more than the opposite of fragility.
The thinking goes like this – if something is fragile, it will break when it is hit or dropped. If something is robust or resilient, it will not break if it is hit or dropped. Antifragility goes beyond being robust or resilient. If something is antifragile, it will actually thrive from the disruption of being hit or dropped.
If the “something” is actually a “someone”, the same principles apply. A fragile person will ‘break’ or suffer irredeemably when hit with a physical, emotional, financial or other difficulty. A resilient person will recover and then continue as previously, whereas an antifragile person will flourish and advance as a result of adversity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb defines antifragility in these words:
“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. 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 … even our own existence as a species on this planet.”
Many experienced educators sense that students in schools today are less emotionally resilient than they were a generation ago. Teachers anecdotally illustrate these views by referring to higher absenteeism, declining persistence in meeting challenges, increasing incidence of mental health issues, difficulties in forming relationships (away from screens), inattention in class, refusal to attend school, and decreasing capacity to accept personal responsibility. Similarly, many school principals feel that young teachers today are less emotionally resilient than their predecessors, anecdotally referring to increasing periods of stress leave, declining compliance with regulatory demands, difficulty in controlling even small classes, and entrenchment of a ‘work-to-rules’ mentality.
Realistically, these observations probably reflect changes in society as a whole rather than school environments specifically. Nonetheless it raises an interesting question – if the increase in personal emotional fragility is seen as a negative trend, should our target be to raise more resilient people, or should we be seeking to raise more antifragile people?
It's a fair question to ask in this era of incessant disruptive change. Is it sufficient to be able to recover from a financial, emotional or other blow, battered and bruised but surviving, or should we be seeking the skills to grow – to flourish – through adversity? Rather than just recovering from mistakes, can we actually become stronger?
Writing in 2013, the US author Buster Benson identified ten principles from Taleb’s book that can help develop an antifragile life:
These principles can probably be summed up by the metaphor of seeking to run a marathon rather than a sprint, always keeping options open, and experimenting by trying lots of different things in life while maintaining an open mind towards new opportunities and circumstances. Schools ought to be better placed than most organisations to achieve antifragility because they are inherently based upon a culture of learning and adaptability – or if not, they should be. This may mean sacrificing efficiency in the short-term for long-term gain, or in other words, thinking ahead to second-order consequences of decisions.
In his 2013 book “The Most Important Thing”, the investor Howard Marks explains the importance of second-order thinking (which he calls second-level thinking) in these words:
“First-level thinking is simplistic and superficial, and just about everyone can do it (a bad sign for anything involving an attempt at superiority). All the first-level thinker needs is an opinion about the future, as in “The outlook for the company is favourable, meaning the stock will go up.” Second-level thinking is deep, complex and convoluted”.
Second-order thinking therefore deliberately goes beyond immediacy and seeks to understand consequences by asking questions such as “And then what?” or “And so what?”. In order to engage in second-order thinking, it can help to create a flow diagram of scenarios like the one shown below. Identify your decision, think through the possible consequences, write them down and then evaluate the balance between the “positives” and the “negatives”. If this process is undertaken regularly, it should prepare you or any individual to enhance the capacity for antifragility.
Many of the things that happen to people in everyday life are the result of events or actions that are first-order negative but second-order positive. Therefore, even situations which seem inherently negative may not be once the second-order consequences are explored. This is where antifragile people can flourish compared with fragile and even resilient people – antifragile people are more likely to see the positive second and third-order consequences than others who struggle to see beyond the immediate first-order consequences.
Second-order thinking may take more effort than first-order thinking because it is not always easy to think in terms of systems, interactions, and time. However, it is the key to developing antifragility.
So, what does antifragility look like in practice? For a teacher or a school principal, it might take the form of being dismissed from a school and thus being forced to look for a new position, which results in professional growth, opportunities for travel and enhanced family life beyond anything that was previously possible. For a school student, it may mean failing a subject, being forced to take up an alternative area of study, and then thriving through the unforeseen opportunities that arise.
Of course, any disruptive scenario is also capable of spiralling downwards into disaster. The defence against a downward spiral is antifragility – maintaining alternative options, being prepared to take risks, and visioning consequences, perhaps helped by a healthy dose of optimism.
- Dr Stephen Codrington
References:
Benson B (2013) “How to Be Antifragile: Live Like a Hydra”, Better Humans.
Marks H (2013) “The Most Important Thing Illuminated”, Columbia Business School.
Taleb NN (2012) “Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder”, Random House.
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