Agile Class Week 14: Antifragile

Our professor discussed about Antifragility. He showed a picture of a book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Taleb. According to Taleb, antifragile are things that benefit from disorder. Antifragile things have a convex response to a stressor or source of harm (for some range of variation), leading to a positive sensitivity to increase in volatility (or variability, stress, dispersion of outcomes, or uncertainty).

To understand antifragile, let’s first define its opposite, fragile; things that are fragile are harmed by disorder. For example, a crystal glass is fragile. If you set one on a table and the kids get playful and bump the table or there is an earthquake, and the glass falls to the floor, it will likely break. To protect such a fragile thing you might keep it in the china cabinet and only take it out on rare, very special occasions.

A lot of the ideas in Antifragile are exactly the same as in agile development. The tendency to want to stabilize systems by suppressing randomness and variability that Taleb criticizes has its parallel in waterfall development’s desire to have a predictable project. Taleb argues that instead of relying on predictions, it is better to be in a position where you can take advantage of variations.

Source(s):

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto)
Agile & Risk Management: Antifragile
Antifragility and Software Development