Fragility, Resilience & Antifragility

We need resilient systems - we're all used to hearing and thinking that.

That in an age of increasing social, economic and ecological disruptions we need political/economic/community/household/food systems that are resilient in the face of shocks. Resilient meaning, depending on who you talk to, the ability to bounce back after a shock to the same kind of place you were in before it happened.

A few years ago Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the Wall Street trader turned free-range intellectual and author, published a book which took the field of resilience in a different direction to what we have been used to hearing.

He writes:

"Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.

Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile.

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better."

Interesting, ay?

All of a sudden we have a new spectrum to mull over in terms of the systems we design and reconfigure. A different concept to deal with the age of planetary crises in which, according to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2022 Global Risks Report amongst many others, we are all set to increasingly encounter, and be challenged by a “volatile, fractured, and increasingly catastrophic” events.

A spectrum that looks like this:

Fragile ------------>Resilient/Robust ------------>Antifragile

Now where this gets really interesting is when we have a bit of an explore of what this means in relation to our food and fibre systems, and investment in them.

Taleb finds, in his exploration of antifragile systems, that they are characterised by distributed infrastructure and decentralisation. Shocks and impacts can be contained to different distributed nodes, rather than impacting a whole centralised system.

Redundancies, randomness and diversity are other properties in the mix, i.e. a natural grassland seedbank rich in a diversity of varieties that can flourish in different seasons - some will be redundant in wet years, and come into their own in the dry years.

Another one is the need for everyone to have skin in the game - 'danger arises when a select few –especially those with an abundance of resources or power – are able to capture the upside for themselves while exposing others to downside risks of losses or harm.'