Anti-fragility, coined by N. Taleb, is the concept that some things benefit from bumpy, chaotic shocks.
I've written about my theory tying Fragility/Efficiency, Resilence and Anti-Fragility before. Driving around lost in the construction filled, closed freeway ramp and slow driving cars of Portland, a new example of anti-fragility showed itself to me: being lost.
To be efficient, to know the best routes at various times - one must experiment, explore, fail, be frustrated, get lost in the streets of a city only partially known.
When we talk about progress, results and success, you've got the best shot for certain high results when playing in the efficient/fragile bucket. That's where the 10 steps to X, 5 best practices for N, Timothy Ferris recipes for optimization fall. You can follow those recipes, but even then success isn't guaranteed. It's just a recipe that has worked for someone else.
Anti-fragility is the space of wildcards and emergence. Sure you can win big, but you can also completely fail. And there's a lot more failure than success. (Actually, to be honest, the values of fail/succeed are not applicable in this bucket - except they are used by people from the efficient/resilient value set.) But when you're trying to create this kind of space in your organization, most upper management expects some kind of solid results.
Enter Resilience.
A middle ground. Resilience has solid results. It's optimized for values of stability, consistency and certainty. Which perhaps isn't very optimized. Like jello, or silly putty it's about returning to a stable state. The known. Certainty.
It's moving between all 3 that is interesting. Sure you can hang out/prefer one of those buckets. Many ideas/concepts/companies/products/industries move through all of these.
