What does ‘antifragile’ mean?

Antifragile book cover

We are living through a time of extraordinary change. And like the exponential growth of Covid-19, the rate of that change is accelerating.

If we want to live well through this time of change we can’t just do more of what worked in the past. We need a new approach to leading ourselves and other people through this time of massive change.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s third book gives us a hint of what that might look like. In it he invents a new word: ‘antifragile’.

Summarising his argument, Taleb says that:

  • Things, people, and organisations that break under stress we call ‘fragile’
  • Things, people, and organisations that do not break under stress we call ‘strong’, ‘robust’, or ‘resilient’
  • So let’s invent a new word for things, people, and organisations that actually become stronger under stress. Let’s call this word: “anti-fragile”

The Churning, Inner Leadership is a book that describes a framework and a set of tools for how to become antifragile: how we can learn not only to survive the changes that are happening but actually to use those changes to become stronger.

Because only when our response to any new challenge or change is simply to use it to become clearer about what we most want and more determined to achieve that, only then will this time of churning come to an end.

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Adapted from Inner Leadership: a framework and tools for building inspiration in times of change.

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You can buy the book here and the workbook here.

(And remember: you can’t learn to swim just by reading about swimming, you also need to do the practice.)


Photo By Gene Ng via StockPholio.net

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