Let Antifragility Reign In - Please Don't Make Human Systems Fast Food Process

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I was watching Nassim Nicholas Taleb talk on his book Antifragility: Things that Gain from Disorder on Authors@Google. I was going through an interesting article on Why Your IT Project May Be Riskier Than You Think on HBR. A new term "black swan" caught my imagination and a few hours later I ended up with Taleb's talk.

Disclaimer - I haven't read the book yet so this is not a book review but a way to motivate myself and justify either buying the book or at least borrowing it from somewhere. I'm currently trying to laboriously and lethargically read the book The Signal and The Noise by Nate Silver. So it would be some time before I can put my hand to another one.

What I found interesting in Taleb's Antifragile talk?

So coming back to Taleb's talk there were a few key takeaways that managed to stuck in my mind because of the lighthearted conversation of the author as well as the simplicity of the idea; these key ideas were:

1. Anything organic communicates with the environment with variability - I should remind myself that I'm organic!
2. We're healthy because the fragile cells are the first that breaks under stress to give way for stronger cells (the author was drawing heavily from the field of medicine) - thank you "what doesn't kills me makes me strong" naah..."what kills my weaker makes me stronger!
3. Great moderation or trying to minimize volatility in a system leads to hidden risks (or "black swans") that can greatly damage the system (for example that's what happened with  the US economy during the 1980s) - I wonder why the regularization cuts in US under Bill Clinton created too much volatility?
4. Failure rate is converted into a benefit for the system - fail more and remove the stigma.

Now these are an interesting set of thoughts. However the waves of mind correlated this talk to another interesting article I read on HBR on How Netflix Reinvented HR. One of the key ideas in the one hundred and twenty six slides was "our model is to increase employee freedom as we grow, rather than limit it". Most of the times as a company grows "the process emerges to stop the chaos". Is that right?

System = Chaos + Process As per the article the "process brings seductively strong near-term outcome". That's true a good process is efficient and reduces the chaos in the system. Should a process be "tuned" to not affect the lightly coupled links that allow enough interaction to let the beating heart of chaos going on and at the same time avoid a sense of misdirection? It's a tough question to answer from my level but I think any process should be a healthy mixture of chaos and robustness. As Taleb says in his book "we need a mechanism by which a system regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random effects..."

I was interested in the relationship that turned out to be a close connection between Netflix's approach to HR (How Netflix Reinvented HR) and Taleb's antifragility. Both seem to be connected by the same message there needn't be a reason to have a "formalized" process (or let's call it the strong will to have a moderate process and reduce "chaos" or randomness as the organization/system expands) rather than we can look for opportunities to encourage randomness and loose coupling with other systems that are useful but not mandatory. So here's to chaos and more randomness. Hence this article is completely random idea to sew together two chain of thoughts I recently pursued. I'll leave up to the reader to make sense of this gibberish!

We're a team, not a family - from How Netflix Reinvented HR.