Here is where Taleb’s description of Black Swans comes in direct contact with his introduction of the distinction between fragile and anti-fragile (Taleb, 2012, p. 7):
“An annoying aspect of the Black Swan problem–in fact the central, and largely missed, point–is that the odds of rare events are simply not computable. We know a lot less about hundred-year floods than five-year floods-model error swells when it comes to small probabilities. The rarer the event, the less tractable, and the less we know about how frequent its occurrence–yet the rarer the event, the more confident these “scientists” involved in predicting, modeling, and using PowerPoint in conferences with equations in multicolor background have become.”
Finally, Taleb (2012, p. 7) turns to the wisdom about fragility that is offered by a widely available but unlikely source:
“It is of great help that Mother Nature-thanks to its anti-fragility-is the best expert at rare events, and the best manager of Black Swans; in its billions of years it succeeded in getting here without command-and-control instruction from an Ivy League-educated director nominated by a search committee. Antifragility is not just the antidote to the Black Swan; understanding it makes us less intellectually fearful in accepting the role of these events as necessary for history, technology, knowledge, everything.”
We are left with an interesting (and important) paradox. Many of the events that expose fragility are manufactured by Mother Nature (hurricanes, floods, pandemics). Yet, Mother Nature might be the best teacher with regard to establishing anti-fragile mind-sets and systems.
It should be noted that Taleb identifies not only systems and institutions that are fragile. He also identifies those that occupy a position of anti-fragility. There is a third category of institutions that Taleb includes. These are robust institutions who are typically immune with regard to the conditions of volatility (and I would suggest the other five VUCA-Plus conditions). Some of the very large institutions that are unable to dance might be assigned to this third category—though I would suggest that many robust institutions might not remain for long in a state of immunity. VUCA-Plus conditions are creating a storm that can’t readily be ignored by those living and leading in these robust bastions of indifference.
Taleb offers a rich and provocative list of institutional characteristics related to Fragile, Robust, and Anti-Fragile (Taleb, 2012, pp. 23-27) The institutional characteristic that are most often associated with anti-fragile include increasing variations in the system, reducing the isolation of domains, and assuming a stoic attitude. I would add a closely related strategy to his list. His list should include the capacity of an institution to integrate the polarizing forces operating in (and energized by) the crisis.
With the COVID-19 crisis we find the pull between a “herd” policy (natural buildup of immunization) and a preventative policy combining pharmaceutical interventions (immunization shots) with nonpharmaceutical interventions (quarantine, masks and social distancing)). I have written about ways in which these policies can be interwoven with one another (Bergquist, 2021). Similarly, we can find a pull between short-term solutions (dealing with the immediate crisis via disaster relief and building of more effective barriers) and long-term solutions (prevention or at least slowing of global warming) when faced with a “natural” disaster.
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