Antifragile Systems become stronger with shocks

An antifragile system is a system that becomes stronger and more resilient in response to stressors, shocks, or disturbances. The concept of antifragility is the opposite of fragility, where a system becomes weaker or breaks down in response to stressors. Antifragile systems are necessarily Complex systems exhibit emergent behavior that are composed of fragile elements, whose breaks and failures provide the means of strengthening the system as a whole.

Examples of antifragility can be found in natural systems such as living organisms, ecological systems, and economies.


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

The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means crucially—a love of errors, a certain class of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them—and do them well. Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility.

source: Antifragile – Taleb (2012)


#strategic #complex-systems

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