Are Your Designs Antifragile?

Are your designs Antifragile?

In the book ‘Antifragile’, author Nassim Taleb discusses the concept of building robust systems for man-made black swans and other associated misfits mother nature throws at us - in other words - Chaos. While his use cases are more on the financial markets, I found the concept fits perfectly to cloud system and platform designs. How you might ask?

Antifragility is an interesting concept in that you can directly apply it to pretty much any and all system designs. It actually goes beyond robust in that when a system becomes antifragile, it becomes stronger when it is hit by what would be considered damaging incidents. An example would be a heavy addition of data from a large acquisition. A company whose mindset is “Data is our Asset” would be in a position to prosper in this scenario as they would already have strategies to seek and reach ‘antifragile’ states quickly and financially benefit from the additional data. A company that is ‘antifragile’ considers data as an asset like the services and products your company offers. Not an afterthought, or a challenge, but as a primary driver for building the company revenue and the customers trust.

Nassim refers to ‘uncertainty’ and ‘volatility’ as opportunities for optionality in markets and life. The one poised with the most options in volatility wins but one must first create a strong system of processes, rules and mindsets like the sailor looking forward to the storm. You can’t compete with that – hello Salesforce.

I’ll be writing more on design concepts this year but for now here are a few good takeaways.

If you are antifragile you can play in the most challenging situations when your competition is running for the hills. It makes the following true:

• Clarity and Calm are sisters.

• Randomness is fun.

• Chaos is opportunity (and fun, so many opportunities).

• Black Swans are gifts.