\u201cWho wants to go through pain in order to come out stronger on the other side?\u201d I can almost hear my high school coaches screaming it in my ear as they pushed us to train harder, run faster, and push ourselves further.<\/p>\n
While I don\u2019t endorse the toxic masculinity that typically comes with male-driven athletics, there is something to be said about the mindset to push past the pain, resistance, and difficulty to find yourself stronger, more agile, emotionally fortified, and cognitively more dynamic after experiencing self-induced and everyday challenges.<\/p>\n
But are most people willing to endure such hardship or are we more prone towards fragility? Do most people avoid disorder at all cost or when met with it doe not know how to deal with it positively or beneficially? This is the question that Nassim Nicholas Taleb considers in his philosophical and social science book, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder.<\/p>\n
To help frame his argument, Taleb uses three key terms: 1) Fragile; 2) Robust; 2) Antifragile. He refers to this as the \u201cTriad.\u201d<\/p>\n
Taleb defines fragile as things that break under pressure. \u201cFragility implies more to lose than to gain, equals more downside than upside, equals unfavorable asymmetry,\u201d wrote Taleb. (1)<\/p>\n
Robust is a concept that the author builds on in his book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Robust things resist the pressure to break, often unharmed. Robustness is the ability to take something negative that happens to you and turn it into a positive. And yet, robustness is not enough according to the author.<\/p>\n
Antifragile is different than reliance or robustness. \u201cThe resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better\u2026The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means\u2014 crucially\u2014a love of errors, a certain class of errors,\u201d agued Taleb.(2)<\/p>\n
He compares antifragile to Hercules battle with Hydra, a mythological serpentine beast that despite getting its heads cut off, it only sprouts more heads. A small side note, the deer, starfish, iguana, sea cucumber, and zebrafish are among many in the animal kingdom that can grow back limbs after they are removed. Why did God not see it fit that humans regrow body parts that are accidentally removed?<\/p>\n
The author is not calling people, organizations, or systems to throw themselves headlong into hardship without preparation and understanding of how to deal with what is required to make you antifragile. The antifragile leaders, organizations, and systems are not persons or things who has their foot down on the gas pedal 24\/7, 365. In fact, \u201cOur antifragilities have conditions,\u201d wrote Taleb. \u201cThe frequency of stressors matters a bit. Humans tend to do better with acute than with chronic stressors, particularly when the former are followed by ample time for recovery, which allows the stressor to do their job as messengers.\u201d (3)<\/p>\n
To prepare for antifragility, Taleb argued that training is necessary. Individuals and organizational teams need to prepare to embrace chaos and disorder emotionally, physically, socially, spiritually, and cognitively.<\/p>\n
Of course, this connects back to Bolsinger\u2019s call on leaders to embrace the working, heating, holding, hammering, hewing, and tempering of becoming a resilient leader. However, leaders who are equipped also need to equip others. A leader cannot also expect all of the individuals in their organization to see, embrace, and deal with disorder in the same way. This stretches to Erin Meyers work on understanding the culture and context of each individual in the organization. Therefore, the challenging work of leaderships to truly understand how to motivate, inspire, equip, and renew individuals as they face hardship individually and collectively.<\/p>\n
(1) Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder<\/em> (New York: Random House, 2014), 158.<\/p>\n (2) Ibid, 20.<\/p>\n (3) Ibid, 58.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cWho wants to go through pain in order to come out stronger on the other side?\u201d I can almost hear my high school coaches screaming it in my ear as they pushed us to train harder, run faster, and push ourselves further. While I don\u2019t endorse the toxic masculinity that typically comes with male-driven athletics, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2412,2413,2414,2411],"class_list":["post-29256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-antifragile","tag-fragile","tag-robust","tag-taleb","cohort-lgp11"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29256"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29257,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29256\/revisions\/29257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}