Public Service Coach (Singapore) and Deputy Chief (Industry & Organization Transformation), SportSG.
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Antifragility refers to a characteristic in people who thrive as a result of stressors. This means they bounce back even stronger when under stress. Resilience, by comparison, is about going back to the old state after the stress is alleviated. An everyday life example of antifragility is body building, where muscles under stress can become stronger as part of a training regime—thus the person becomes stronger.
Increasingly, the topic of resilience has come up as a coping mechanism, which at best provides the impetus for staying power. Antifragility takes this further and aspires for growth in the face of stressors. It is the power of breaking forth, just like how a seed might need to emerge from the soil and sprout from the ground. Antifragility is generative and the concept can be extended from individuals to teams to organizations.
Individuals
The starting point of coaching for antifragility in individuals can be at the physiological or psychological level. For the latter, association with post-traumatic stress disorder is often framed in negative terms. However, antifragility offers a different perspective that taps into your entire being to help you believe there is an avenue for post-traumatic growth. Beyond these levels, coaching for antifragility involves activating the whole person—from being physically and mentally well to emotionally and socially connected—and paying attention to needful aspects of life such as physical activity, sleep, nutrition and mental wellness. Designing workplace coaching for the whole person is important in the post-pandemic age.
It is important to recognize that it is not just stressors that bring people down, but the lack of recovery. A recovery routine should ideally tap mindfulness every few hours, physical activity and sleep regimen every day and social and spiritual recharge every week. In this zone, you're better able to connect to your emotions and don't need to rationalize feelings.
In my experience, an unhealthy reliance on the cognitive brain can create anxiety and reinforce detrimental neural pathways linking every instance of stress with the "bad stuff." Such a mindset invariably focuses on avoidance measures and subconsciously opens the mind to tune into the voice of judgment and fear. These voices speak to the insecurities of the person and bad consequences. Being antifragile means consciously embracing humanity while still having the courage to be authentic. It frees you to practice gratitude. Antifragility allows you to live your life purpose from back to front—uncovering destiny rather than discovering it.
Teams
The concept of antifragility can be extended to teams. Tension in the workplace often results in team members focusing on what they do not want to happen (avoiding the "bad stuff") and being stuck in problem-solving mode. When the energy of the team is sucked into perpetual and endless fire-fighting, it is impossible to achieve extraordinary results.
The antifragile approach instead seeks to turn the negative stress into eustress by encouraging a curious mindset and focusing on what the team can create collectively through a generative orientation. This can potentially release new energy for the team to achieve new breakthroughs. Take, for instance, when a team is thrown a challenging target: One typical approach is to divide up the work into smaller pieces and assign them to every member.
This approach of "divide and conquer" can work in certain settings, but it does not tap into the collective and what the team might be able to achieve together. For the manager to collate individual deliverables at the component level and hope to achieve coherence means the whole is at best the sum of its parts. The antifragile team is one that translates collective thinking into superior collective action so that the results show that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
To coach teams for antifragility, focus on unlocking team confidence through higher-level collective thinking and create space for safe experimentation.
Organizations
When it comes to working across teams, the level of complexity increases and the intentional efforts to build higher-quality relationships becomes even more important, so that better collective thinking can be achieved. When leading projects across teams, what’s worse than managers providing partial or wrong answers is for managers to ask the wrong questions! The latter may cause the cross-functional team to go into a tailspin, barking up the wrong tree and chasing after inconsequential targets that do not move the needle.
Discouragement is a precursor to fragility, and only through collective thinking can an organization keep itself free from having overt blind spots. Antifragility is nurtured through a trusting environment, where teams constantly build and reinforce their container for honest conversations to happen. This leads to better decisions and actions, resulting in higher quality results. When the team experiences these successful results, members feel encouraged and this further strengthens motivation and confidence, improving the quality of relationships in a virtuous and antifragile loop.
At the organization level, coaches can bring antifragility a notch higher by encouraging leaders to pay attention to random and uncoordinated actions across teams. Workplace coaches can help leaders think about redundancy so there is no single point of failure.
Organizations are a system of systems. Therefore, at the enterprise level, a systems-thinking approach is required to deal with "wicked-mess" issues. Often, functional units and geographical demarcations make it hard to achieve synergy due to siloed departments. However, it is not uncommon to have multinational customers demand service across their global network, and the organization can come under stress if it does not have a systemic view of its business operations. Antifragility can come in the form of shoring up a "team of teams" to create new structures to deliver holistic global solutions.
Having a systems-thinking approach and understanding complexity that is aligned to organizational aspirations is critical. This allows for generative conversations to take place by tapping into double-loop learning. Ultimately, at the systems level, antifragile units are made up of antifragile team members who live out their life of purpose, taking many small risks and constantly learning. Teams with such a growth mindset are instrumental in building organizations that do not falter in uncertain times under stress, eventually becoming antifragile businesses that thrive.
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