Antifragile organizations have a culture that enables people to learn fast from their environment, adapt to it, and take advantage of volatility. Some of the characteristics of antifragile organizations are:
- Systems Thinking: Everybody in the organization knows the organization’s goals and ensures their work directly contributes to these goals.
- Theory Y Management: Management has to assume that employees are self-motivated and can learn how to solve problems themselves. Therefore, organizations should hire antifragile people who can thrive in this environment. Drive, the book by Daniel Pink, discusses providing autonomy, purpose, and the opportunity to learn and master new skills for people. The book states it stops people from leaving and increases the antifragility of an organization.
- Continuous Experimentation: According to Toyota Kata, good management knows that the best solutions come from the workers. They develop an environment where practitioners can run experiments and learn faster. The feedback loops practiced in command and control organizations are too slow for them to adapt effectively.
- Disruptive Product Development: Antifragile organizations are not content with the stress generated by their environment. Like humans exercising, they try and disrupt themselves (the organizational equivalent of a game day). Consider the example of Amazon, who cannibalized its own business by creating the Amazon Marketplace and the Kindle. Another example is Apple who is cannibalizing its Mac business with the iPad. Fragile organizations resist disrupting their product lines like Toshiba did at first with flash memory. If you do an excellent job at this, you never need to worry about the competition. You will beat it.
Antifragile organizations support Agile and Lean philosophies well. Many enterprises have invested in these philosophies over the past decades.
DASA DevOps Leader
DASA DevOps Leader is designed for those taking on the role of DevOps Leader, tasked with spearheading DevOps initiatives, crafting frameworks for scalability, and driving maximum business value. The program helps understand leadership in the context of DevOps, discusses leadership development models, building teams, and transforming the organization.
