Antifragile systems benefit from disorder, randomness, errors or volatility and gain from them. Short iterations with frequent feedback allow projects to benefit from mistakes and changes instead of being harmed by them. Planning too far in advance restricts optionality and ability to change course, while frequent retrospectives help teams learn and improve. Embracing challenges within reason makes individuals and systems stronger over time.

1. Antifragile & Agile
14/4/2014 1

2. Introductory video
• It's about how hard you can get hit and keep
moving forward. How much you can take and
keep moving forward
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6w4Xtsf
yVo

3. Luc Taesch @luctaesch
• Autodidacte in IT, First commercial software when 16. Later math SUP, then IT and
25 Years PM, Architect, and BA. Mainly in market finance, since 87. Freelancing
around Europe since 95.
• Personal curiosity in psychology, zen, meditation, martial arts. Animated or Co
founded a few short therapy / personal development groups. Try and bridge this
into professional life for the last 20 years.
• Discover agile in 99, see it works, wonder why…
• Best recent explanations based on Kanheman cognitive bias, and Taleb anti-
fragility .
• Practice what you preach : Barefoot running, Paleo Eating, Freelancing for 20Y.
(see Doxastic commitment , or “soul in the game”)
• AntiFragile provided me words and concepts for what I was intuitively doing all my
life (slightly against the tide)…
• And also I can now conceptualize why the system dysfunctions, which I already
noticed a while ago… (see Narrative Fallacy ? ☺ )

4. (My perception on )
Agile, Antifragile and Cognitive bias
AntifragileAntifragile
AgileAgile
Cognitive BiasCognitive Bias
Design ThinkingDesign Thinking Lean StartupLean Startup
Product
Design
Project
execution
Go To
Market
Provides
concepts
(Theory) for
system design
Provides a ground .
Cognitive Theory
on human behavior

5. Nicholas Nassim Taleb
@nntaleb
• Is a former option trader, who became « financially independant » in 87, and
richer in 2007. He specialized in rare events (« black swan »)
• Has a independent mindset, and quite a character. Large Culture, 6 Langages.
• Has written four philosophical books on uncertainty and how the current
prevailing mindset is tainting our view on life. (and more technical Math papers).
• He influenced Kahneman (Behavioral Psychologist, Economy Nobel 2002, worked
on cognitive biases ),
– who suggested him to sneak into academy (instead of fighting from outside)

6. This is Fragile

7. This is Robust

8. Up to a certain Point

9. This is Anti fragile

10. Antifragility can be applied to lots
of domains
• Personal Life
• Health, medecine
• Economics
• Corporate
• Technology
• Politics
• Being given 20 mn and an IT audience, We will try and play
and discover how it relates to project management , linear
and agile

11. Convexity
Anti fragile :
Benefit from random ,
gain from disorder
( up to a certain point)
Fragile :
Fear random and disorder

12. Your body is convex hence
antifragile
• Jump 1x from 10 m , harms you badly (!)
• Jump 5x from 2 m, and you may develop
• Jump 1000 x from 1 cm, is possibly tiring at max.
• Your body has a convex response to harm ( jumping)
• If your body had a linear one, you would be dead walking to
the office.
– If you have not smiled to the last one, re-read until you do
☺. I did not clicked the first time…

13. I would be dead walking to the office if
the body had a linear response to
harm (exercise)
Small Jumps
Harm
Intensity
Walking
High Jumps
Too High Jumps
Cumulative Harm,
if Linear
Convex Assumption
Linear Assumption
I can exercise long in
that zone and no harm
I can exercise in that
zone and benefit
Every steps would
harm me a bit more

14. Personas
• Fragilista
– Hate disorder
– Seek stability by trying to stabilise the
environment
• Anti Fragilista
– Seek stability by embracing challenge
– Embraces randomness

15. Team size
• Up to a certain point , bigger team means
more productivity, then it falters…
– (typically : 7+/-2 for a team, 100-150 for a tribe)
– A : More is more
– B :Less is more
– See hormesis A B

16. Volatility in IT
• In a project :( perceived) scope, requirements, costs,
"resources", people changes , (perception of) complexity,
estimation, dependencies
• Outside the project: other projects, resource competition,
strategy, IT landscape, business changes, reorganisation,
manager changes, politics
• Outside the company: technology, market , market
conditions, M&A

17. Planning ( fallacies)
• You missed the exit on the highway
• would you be happy driving 100 km until the
next one ?
• You want … Optionality….

18. Serial optionality (the cliquet
property).
• A rigid business plan gets one locked into a preset invariant
policy, like a highway without exits —hence devoid of
optionality. One needs the ability to change opportunistically
and "reset" the option for a new option, by ratcheting up, and
getting locked up in a higher state. To translate into practical
terms, plans need to 1) stay flexible with frequent ways out,
and, counter to intuition 2) be very short term, in order to
properly capture the long term. Mathematically, five
sequential one-year options are vastly more valuable than a
single five-year option.
• This explains why matters such as strategic planning have
never born fruit in empirical reality: planning has a side effect
to restrict optionality. It also explains why top-down
centralized decisions tend to fail.

19. Short Iterations
• Antifragile tinkering, bricolage
• Trial and errors, errors bringing the « right »
kind of mistakes
» See : Rational flaneur ( vs Tourist)

20. The waterfall « cycle »
• How is this going to react to
change ?
See: the Ludic fallacies

21. The nonteleological property
• 5) Theory is born from (convex) practice more often than the
reverse (). Textbooks tend to show technology flowing from
science, when it is more often the opposite case, dubbed the
"lecturing birds on how to fly" effect. In such developments as
the industrial revolution (and more generally outside linear
domains such as physics), there is very little historical
evidence for the contribution of fundamental research
compared to that of tinkering by hobbyists. Figure 2 shows,
more technically how in a random process characterized by
"skills" and "luck", and some opacity, antifragility —the
convexity bias— can be shown to severely outperform
"skills". And convexity is missed in histories of technologies,
replaced with ex post narratives

22. Retrospectives
• What did we do well, that if we don’t discuss we
might forget?
• What did we learn?
• What should we do differently next time?
• What still puzzles us?

23. The via negativa property
• 7) Better cataloguing of negative results (the via negativa property). Optionality
works by negative information, reducing the space of what we do by knowledge of
what does not work. For that we need to pay for negative results.
Some of the critics of these ideas —over the past two decades— have been
countering that this proposal resembles buying "lottery tickets". Lottery tickets are
patently overpriced, reflecting the "long shot bias" by which agents, according to
economists, overpay for long odds. This comparison, it turns out is fallacious, as
the effect of the long shot bias is limited to artificial setups: lotteries are sterilized
randomness, constructed and sold by humans, and have a known upper bound.
This author calls such a problem the "ludic fallacy". Research has explosive
payoffs, with unknown upper bound —a "free option", literally. And we have
evidence (from the performance of banks) that in the real world, betting against
long shots does not pay, which makes research a form of reverse-banking.

24. Timeboxing
– Threat or opportunity
– Loss Aversion
– Pomodoro
– See: Hormesis
• A bit of stressor, in the right doses, stimulates the
organism and makes it better, stronger, healthier
• Bones and Karate

25. V cycle: forgetting we are human
• See naïve rationalism,
• or Soviet-Harvard delusion

26. (Short) Feedback loop

27. Skin in the game

28. Estimation : planning poker

29. Relative Estimation
• Wysati : What you see is all there is.
• over optimisme
• Exaggerated Confidence

30. Group think
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox
• Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties,
nations, and ages it is the rule.
– (Niezsche quoted by Paul Watzlawick )

31. V :"simplifying" reality does not
change it

32. Information radiators

33. Daily stand up meetings

34. Planning with hands

35. Task boards

36. Peer programming

37. Explicit Help Request

38. References
• A decent (but linear) summary:
http://newbooksinbrief.com/2012/12/17/26-
a-summary-of-antifragile-things-that-gain-
from-disorder-by-nassim-nicholas-taleb/

39. References (technical)
• http://edge.org/conversation/understanding-
is-a-poor-substitute-for-convexity-antifragility
• http://edge.org/conversation/the-fourth-
quadrant-a-map-of-the-limits-of-statistics
• Taleb Douady : Mathematical Definition
Mapping, and Detection of (Anti)Fragility
– http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1208/1208.1189
.pdf

40. Going further
• This is a vast and complex topic, so we created a
« study group » to share what we know, (and what
we don't ☺), and look for applications in personal
and business life.
• http://www.meetup.com/Paris-Antifragile-Meetup/
• Feel free to contact me if you would like to apply this
to impact your business environment .
Luc.taesch@gmail.com @luctaesch www.taesch.com