Antifragility and the conservatism of large organisations
According to Taleb’s Antifragile, organic systems benefit from stressors and variability. And smoothing things too much can actually be harmful to them, as it makes them fragile.
Take for example the organic system of restaurants in a given neighborhood. Any one restaurant—the organism—is fragile. And restaurants vanish and are replaced regularly. But the system of restaurants–the species—is antifragile. And there are often surprising and delighting novelties awaiting epicureans.
On the other hand, our governments sometimes try to smooth the economy too much by fighting variability and bailing out institutions. But instead of benefiting the economy, such actions make it more fragile and therefore prone to collapses and crises.
Organic systems actually like variability, and we would be well advised to refrain from interfering and depriving such systems from variability.
Interestingly, in this context, variability and time are equivalents. And procrastination, in some sense, gives organic systems an evolutionary edge. As an example, postponing chirurgical operations gives the human body—an organic system—a chance to heal itself.
Large companies are organic systems. From the outside, they may be seen as efficient and effective execution machines. But reality is very different. On the inside, they are messy, bureaucratic, politicized, and slow. Large corporations are extremely slow at making decisions. And very often, executives do not even decide. They continuously ask for another piece of information, another study to be conducted, another meeting with other stakeholders in a couple of months… And in the end, priorities may change, managers may change, budgets may be reallocated…
This may be frustrating on the timescale of an employee. It can be very frustrating and demotivating. But if we take a few steps back, this situation seems to be evolved as it benefits such organizations. It’s like with restaurants: the individuals get burned out, but the system benefits.
Postponing—and even avoiding—decisions is actually a very sound, antifragile strategy. It results in a situation similar to a jungle: only the fastest deer, who make it by themselves, can survive, not those that an executive committee decided must survive.