02 How to become an antifragile leader | Mahan Tavakoli Partnering Leadership Insight

Mahan Tavakoli: Welcome to partnering leadership. Thank you very much for all the positive comments and excitement. So when you get a chance, please don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and rate the show. Every once in awhile I'm going to do solo episodes, where I take a leadership principle or concept and talk about it a little bit more in-depth on the podcast. And today I want to tackle the issue of antifragility antifragile leadership.

And it's a concept that was actually first introduced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb antifragility has always existed. However, Nicholas Taleb is the person that put a term to the concept. So to think about anti fragility, let's first see and understand what a fragile system is, what a robust, resilient system is, and what antifragility would be. Example of something that's fragile is think about a glass cup. If you're walking in a glass cup falls out of your hands, it's going to shatter two pieces. It doesn't do well with pressure, right? You want to ship a box of champagne glasses, put all kinds of signs on it fragile. Please be careful this side up. So it's fragile. That represents a fragile system. On the other hand, some things are robust. So yeah, the metal cup, it falls, nothing happens as a result doesn't benefit from the fall, but nothing happens. So if you're shipping metal cups or box of shoes, you don't need to put fragile on it. But sure as heck don't put on the box. Please mishandle, right, it doesn't benefit from pressure doesn't benefit from breakage. On the other hand, anti fragile systems are systems that actually benefit from pressure. benefit from breakage. You might be thinking to yourself, what would benefit from pressure what would benefit from breakage? Pretty simple to start thinking about the human anatomy, our bones. We need pressure on our bones, weight bearing pressure, for the bones to mineralize. Even take it a step higher. Immunity and the immune system or our muscles, your exercise, what happens with exercise, there is tears that happen in the muscles, in the muscle fibers. But they come back and get built stronger than they were before. So someone that repeatedly stresses the muscle and causes breakage in the muscle ends up building stronger muscles as a result, that is an anti fragile system. And therefore, the best leaders, the best organizations, and individuals that thrive, need to seek anti fragility. Now, this is a moment where we all need antifragility. We've all faced significant disruption in our lives, some more, some less, and I don't want to minimize it. It's not easy to experience breakage, it is really hard. And as a leader, you do need to recognize that for your team also. It's not just saying, hey, everything's going to be great, everything's going to be better. Let's just get back to it. No, we do need to recognize that breakage causes a lot of issues for a lot of us. At the same time, maybe we can take a step back and think about how we can become more anti fragile, become even stronger as a result. One way to think about it is think about some of your past experiences. Some of the things that people end up being most proud of in their lives are when there has been a setback. Whether with a job, a project, a significant other, something major, they really wanted it, there has been a setback. But as a result of the setback, rather than being broken, or just being robust and resilient and bouncing back, that setback caused the individual, caused the team, caused the organization to come back stronger to become stronger as a result. As many of us have in our lives, this is the moment we need to think back on those experiences of our lives and make sure we turn this moment into an anti fragile one for ourselves. Another great example that Taleb gives is a three mythical Greek characters. You've got  Damocles, Damocles has this sword dangling over his head with a little fine string. And the smallest stress to that string causes the sword to fall on his head and kill him. Damocles is fragile. Many people are familiar with the Phoenix. When the Phoenix dies, it's reborn from its ashes. Beautiful. It's robust, it's resilient, it remains and it comes back to the same state as it was before.

But Taleb also talks about the Hydra, the other Greek figure. Hydra demonstrates true antifragility. Hydra is a monster with different heads. And as each head is chopped, the Hydra grows two in its place. So pressure, damage, destruction, to a certain extent causes it to become even better. That's true antifragility. In a beautiful passage in "A Farewell to Arms", Hemingway writes, "The world eventually breaks all of us. Afterward many are stronger at the broken places, but those that will not break, it kills". This has been a breaking point and a disruption for many of us. But this is also the point for anti fragility, the point we can look back on a few years from now, where we enabled the breakage to make us stronger, better, and our teams and organizations better as a result. So become an antifragile leader by looking at opportunities to become stronger and better that as a result of this, rather than pining for the old days, rather than just wanting to be robust and resilient to get back what has been lost, use this moment to become even better. That is what true antifragile leadership is all about. Share any and all of your thoughts on antifragile leadership with me at partneringleadership.com and look forward to hearing many successes as You build a stronger team and organization as a result of becoming antifragile.