Anti-Fragility.

For the first approximately 55 years of my life, I had never really heard the word resilience. Today in the modern Ecch-o-system of life, I hear it with stomach-turning frequency.

You hear it about sports teams that bounce back from twelve runs behind, or who start the season 2-7 and then somehow manage to make the playoffs (though it seems nearly everyone makes the playoffs.) You hear it about people who had a crappy childhood and somehow overcame hardship. Or people who had some horrid disease or a bad, debilitating run of misfortune.

But mostly at least to my ears, you hear about companies that have resilient supply chains, or IT infrastructures, or who have rebounded from a serious downturn or skein of bad judgments. 

In fact, I never much thought about the word and its meaning. Most of the people I know and most of the companies I work for and with have a certain degree of resiliency. Who hasn't come back from adversity or, to some degree, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. Most everyone I know has had something lousy happen to them--they've lost a job, somehow gotten into serious debt, or lost a loved one tragically. You keep going. That's life. Today, that's what we call "resilience."

Right now, I'm reading Eric H. Cline's great book, "After 1177 B.C.", which is part of the multi-volume Turning Points in Ancient History series. It's a sequel to the second picture below, "1177 B.C., the Year Civilization Collapsed."

Most people don't realize, the world of the eastern Mediterranean before 1177 B.C., was a pretty vibrant place. There was international travel, trade and exchange of ideas. Then, to misquote William Butler Yeats, the center stopped holding. And civilization after civilization--from the Egyptians to the Cretans, to the Cypriots, to the Babylonians, to the Assyrians, to the Anatolians, and more collapsed. 

For years, historians and archaeologists attributed such world-wide catastrophe to a mysterious people called the Sea People. No one knew where they came from or how they invaded the Mediterranean world--but the destruction of that world was attributed to those Sea People. For centuries global collapse was allegedly due to their advanced technologies (weapons and low-draft, fast ships and fierce deportment.)

However, more recently, historians and archaeologists have let the Sea People off the hook. Collapse was due to the same collection of forces that are affecting seemingly most of the world today. They include, "climate change, attacks by foreign enemies, social uprising, natural catastrophes, systems collapse, and changes in warfare.”

Those circumstances, 4000 years ago and today, almost inevitably lead to "(1) the collapse of the central administrative organization; (2) the disappearance of the traditional elite class; (3) a breakdown of the centralized economy; (4) a settlement shift; and (5) population decline. To these, as additional symptoms specifically of a dark age, I would add (6) a loss of writing; and (7) a pause in the construction of monumental architecture."

Now, after all that comes the point of today's post.

Cline cites a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb who  introduced me to the notion of the Black Swan event. (A Black Swan event is an unpredictable and unforeseen occurrence that has severe and widespread consequences.)

Taleb in writing about civilizations that endured the collapses of 1177 B.C. uses the phrase, “anti-fragile.” Not resiliency. Anti-fragility. 

Resiliency is bouncing back. 

Anti-fragile is more. Better. Stronger.

Anti-fragile people and systems and governments actually  “thrive under the right amount of stress.” They don't just get back up again. They take advantage of adversity. In dark times, they don't just survive--they flourish. 

Taleb says it best: Anti-fragile entities "gain from disorder.”

When I look back on my long life in the advertising business, I know no successful person, no successful agency that isn't, as you'd expect, resilient. 

Resiliency is the sine non qua--the essential element--of being a human. 

When I got fired by Ogilvy at the age of 62 for being too old, I wasn't merely resilient. I created a new way of creating for myself. I became better--smarter, faster, more-aggressive and more driven than I ever was before. I became more reliant on myself. I became more determined to succeed--for myriad reasons--nor the least of which was showing the WPPCPAs that their narrow-minded and larcenous modus operandi would not do me in.

Much of the work I do now is with start-ups and with technology companies. Working with them is a bit like working with yearling horses. Somedays they're riding high and they look like a shoo-in to run for the roses at Churchill Downs. Other days--they're yearlings, remember, they can barely make it out of the paddock. No one is born a champion. No one is a champion every day.

That takes work.

That takes anti-fragility.

--

BTW, Cline's books are frightening in their relevance to our world today. While he is not an "easy" writer and there's a lot of Aššur-reša-išis, wandering Aramaeans, and  Nebuchadnezzars to wade through, there are lessons to be learned and things to think. On nearly every page.

Would that the world's leaders actually read books about the world they purport to lead.