Systems Thinking — Antifragility

If we look at all the parts of systems design that involve maintenance and upgrading then it’s not just about making good systems but also systems that improved.

When combined with self-healing and automating systems (although automating isn’t necessarily required) we get to a point of something Nassim Nicole Taleb covered in his book, Antifragility.

There are paths towards antifragility and like automation itself is a spectrum and can be a wide definition and take on characteristics of this definition while not being “fully antifagile”.

Taleb’s own concise explanation of antifragility:

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

First line of the wikipedia article on antifragility:

“Antifragility is a property of systems in which they increase in capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures.”

It’s about systems improving themselves. This happens in nature all the time, if you just think of muscles then exercise is a stressor that actually damages the muscle. The body’s process of rebuilding and repairing the muscle damage also makes the muscle larger and more capable to be able to handle the same stressor better in future.

It’s what we should strive for with our designed systems too, that we not only account for as many inputs as we can but the system can also adapt to those inputs and improve to handle those known inputs better as well as handle inputs that you didn’t or couldn’t design for.

In marketing we could automate split (or A/B) testing that improves the content it outputs in a cycle. This isn’t quite a fully antifragile system but it’s along those lines with automating an improvement without you needing to do anything. It could even adapt to longer term input changes such as social attitude shifts.

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