Antifragility in the digital age

Antifragility is a property of systems that increase in capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. It is a concept developed by Professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book, Antifragile, which can be frustrating to read if you are not into hardcore academic papers. However I find this concept ever more relevant in times of a global pandemic that has vastly accelerated the digital transformation. As Einstein once said: “It is really when entire companies need to work from home fully will they realise and capitalise upon the digital tools they under-estimated”.

What does this mean for the layman? In times of volatility which is really our times - anti-fragile systems have everything to gain and fragile systems have everything to loose. Financially, anti-fragility translates into buying options and fragility into selling options. Everything that has adapted with time is anti-fragile really: whether it is our biological evolution, our cultures, the revolutions and or really good recipes.

I noticed that it isn’t industry that defines anti-fragility despite major headwinds in say - fashion - where both footfall and appetite for new clothes decreased dramatically. Look at GymShark. They managed to blow their top-line and bottom-line targets out of the water with strong plans to win in the brick-and-mortar space going full circle on sporting good giants. You could argue their product - leaning on lounge-weare and sports became ever more relevant during the pandemic. But Farfetch, a luxury goods reseller? Farfetch was probably the best performing stock in my portfolio (next to semi-conductors). They grew 97% in this last quarter with more retailers listing more luxury products but also buying more of the media solutions as they need to compete against each other on the same platform. The Amazon model.

Anti-fragility in the professional context meant adapting and staying relevant in remote circumstances but often times recognizing a poor fit the company at hand and walking away for greener pastures. Here comes the tidal wave of the great resignation. 4 million and counting in the US, with 10 million plus jobs open; an unprecedented employees market that has over-spilled in Europe. Who are these anti-fragile professionals? Typically mid-career, often times with secondary sources of income or comfortable savings, working in domains that have boomed in the last two year: tech & healthcare. This also meant higher workloads, more pressure, and more idle time remotely to reflect on it. Philosophically, people were forced to ask - once the social element of the “coffee corner conversation“ is taken out of the equation - whether what is left has meaning. Whether, on the backdrop of a global mourning, the effort make sense and brings higher purpose. For a lot, it just didn’t.

This pushes employers to re-think their retention program in one sense and their company culture in a broader sense. With remote working opening up employment opportunities that used to be off-limit geographically, it became more important to have a strong core supplemented by symptomatically addressing the issue. Data-driven diagnostics become key for identifying the sub-trends in the company that can be indicative of both satisfaction and churn. Distributing this data widely and enabling management with the knowledge enables a hands-on-deck approach to systematically and consistently approach the challenge. One step further, distribution the data across the organization, helps create a culture of transparency where impatience is overruled by awareness and genuine empathy. The concepts that resonate most with the population segment that has started the Great Resignation.