In this decade of disruption (I believe it was called that before the man ate the bat in Hubei Province), it is important that we have people in our teams who can thrive during disruption. Dr. Paige Williams in her book, Becoming Antifragile, proposes that the skill that we need to build in individuals, teams, and organisations is antifragility. She simplifies the concept by concluding that the essence of Becoming Antifragile is being prepared for what we can’t predict. Wouldn’t that be something we could all use right now?
Author Brooke Castillo explores the difference between being fragile, robust or antifragile in the Life Coach School Podcast. When we are robust or resilient, we can encounter adversity and have the inner fortitude to overcome it. To be antifragile, we sit in the feeling, experience it and analyse how and why we reacted how we did. This practice enables us to not just overcome the situation but learn how we felt, why we felt this way and develop techniques that will help us when we encounter adversity in the future. When we are antifragile, the challenging experience result in us being less fragile in the future not more, as is the case when adversity chips away at our resilience one set-back at a time.
Research by Beyond Blue suggests that one-quarter of Australians will experience an anxiety condition in their lifetime, that 1 in 6 has experienced anxiety or depression in the last 12 months. Building our AntiFragility is one way of improving anxiety. Anxiety is effectively fear of the unknown and when we are antifragile – believe we can deal with the unknown because we have taken the time to work through the process in the past.
The challenge for an organisation is to hold the space for employees so they feel comfortable to experience the emotion and learn from it. When there is an issue encountered in the workplace the first reaction is to fix it, once it is rectified a “Lessons Learnt” approach may be instigated. This has the potential to be a litany of excuses. If we sit longer with the problem and work through the impact on the organisation and how to create an environment where the organisation is not exposed to risk, the outcome is more positive. The team is learning how to bounce back together, not protect the individual.
Effectively, when we allow people to make mistakes and learn from them, we are building AntiFragility. When we have an environment where we hide the small mistakes until they combine into a catastrophic one and the people involved do not know how to cope with making mistakes, we are setting the organisation up for disaster. As a leader, we can assist this process by normalising the small mistakes, giving an anecdote of when you have done a similar thing and talk through how it made you feel, how it was rectified and what you learnt. A bit of humour does not go astray and it encourages the admitting of mistakes in the future to all of those in the team. The more opportunities we have to build out AntiFragility with mistakes that can be readily rectified the better off the organisation is.
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