HOW TO LEVERAGE ADVERSITY

In a recent blog, I discussed the difference between resilience and antifragility. As founders, “resilience” is a term we’re all familiar with. Its relevance has skyrocketed since COVID-19 and the ensuing economic hardships that the world is still experiencing to this day. Resilience helps us withstand adversity, whether it comes in the form of setbacks that are financial, cultural, or something else entirely. It’s displayed in the ability to rethink, regroup, and reprioritize goals when faced with tough circumstances or decisions.

Antifragility, on the other hand, is what lies just beyond the edge of resilience. Coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, being antifragile means you don’t just endure or overcome these setbacks — you leverage them to grow more creative, more adaptable, and stronger than you were before. Resilient companies are able to survive hardships, whereas antifragile companies thrive in the face of such adversity. Taleb writes that “the resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”

Read more in Building Resilient and Antifragile Organizations.

This doesn’t mean that resiliency is out and antifragility is in. Rather, the two work in tandem to help you lead and grow a company that not only responds to adversity when it happens but welcomes future challenges before they even present themselves.

PERSPECTIVES

“You have to see failure as the beginning and the middle, but never entertain it as an end.” — Jessica Herrin

“There is no education like adversity.” ― Benjamin Disraeli 

MARK MY WORDS

As a leader, the ability to demonstrate resilience is critical — but it’s a reactive skill. Antifragility is a more proactive approach to overcoming challenges (both foreseen and totally unexpected) that can help you and your teams embrace the intimidating yet unavoidable prospect of failure.

Truly leveraging adversity to your advantage means not being afraid to take risks through experimenting, learning, and adapting. Of course, this must be done in moderation, but the important thing here is knowing that outcomes, successful or not, will always contribute to collective learning. This helps to create an overall growth mindset that is essential for antifragility because it instills the belief that challenges are opportunities for growth rather than insurmountable obstacles.

Remember, there are several ways you can sow the seeds for an antifragile organization (read the blog for more of these) that still supports an agreements-based culture. When handled correctly, antifragility actually reinforces such a culture by encouraging trust, open communication, and a shared sense of purpose. It’s about cultivating adaptability and innovation by giving your team the freedom to take calculated risks, try new things, and learn from potential failure. 

If resilience is armor, then antifragility is a forge. The armor protects you during battles, while the forge helps you emerge stronger by refining and shaping yourself after each challenge. Because in the face of adversity, you’ll need both tools at your disposal — resilience to withstand any issues or challenges that arise, and a healthy amount of antifragility to keep thriving through them, helping your company evolve and adapt into something even greater than it was before.

TUNE IN

Continuing our Stages of Development series, this episode’s focus is on Stage 3, where companies begin to get serious about scaling. I’m introducing a framework for understanding these stages based on revenue projections and organizational confidence, as well as touching on the mindset necessary for founders to guide their organizations effectively.