Antifragility

Crises--such as COVID-19, the Great Recession, and 9/11--are often triggered by low-probability, high-consequence events. Tragedy can help us model the impact of the highly improbable because tragedy is the art form that dramatizes low-probability, high-consequence events. In this book chapter, I demonstrate how tragedy dramatizes the highly improbable in Aeschylus' SEVEN AGAINST THEBES, Sophocles' OEDIPUS REX, and Euripides' BACCHAE. By looking at theatre from the perspective of chance and uncertainty, we may increase our awareness of how risk works in both art and in life, and, in so doing, protect ourselves by becoming antifragile.

Le nuove forme di comunicazione sociale si inseriscono all’interno del quadro di mutamento che la mediatizzazione produce sulle modalità espressive e organizzative di istituzioni e individui. Il volume esamina l’impatto della mediatizzazione sulla comunicazione sociale, tenendo conto di come muti la veicolazione delle buone cause, le quali si diffondono ora mediante i canali social, sono sostenute da motivazioni individuali e si estendono lungo un raggio d’azione sempre più ampio. In questa nuova veste la comunicazione sociale viene detta antifragile e le sue modalità espressive sono definite communication voices. Muovendo dalla teorizzazione all’applicazione empirica, si descrivono degli studi di caso su alcune forme di communication voices: il cultural jumming e il crowdfunding.

Contemporary business ecosystems are continuously challenged by unexpected disruptive events, which are increasing in their frequency and effects. A critical question is why do some organizations collapse in face of extreme events, while others not? On the other hand, current engineering and socio-technical systems were designed to operate in "mostly stable" situations; sporadic instability and disturbances are at best captured by exception handling mechanisms, focusing on reliability and robustness. Recent and more ambitious design goals, however, aim at building systems that are expected to cope with severe disruptions, and survive or even thrive in a context of volatility and uncertainty. This led to an increasing attention to the concepts of resilience and antifragility. As such, this article introduces the findings of a comprehensive literature survey aimed at shedding light on emerging concepts and approaches to handle disruptions in business ecosystems. Main contributions include a clarification of related concepts, identification and classification of disruption sources and drivers, and extensive lists of strategies and underlying capabilities to cope with disruptions. Related perspectives and approaches developed in multiple knowledge areas are also analysed and synthesized. Finally, a collection of engineered systems implementing promising approaches to increase resilience and antifragility are presented.

Course Essential Understanding:
Upon  successful  completion  of  the  course,  the student  is  expected  to  be  able  to demonstrate strong knowledge  on fintech  applications; the  history  &  usage of cryptocurrencies;  and  both  these  technology  domains’  main  market incentives and socioeconomic  drivers–gathering  a  solid understanding  of  the  opportunities  in  the ongoing revolution we  are  living  in.

The  course  is  divided  into  two  main domains with equal importance: We will first understand the digital revolution of Fintech. Then we will build  on  that  fundamental  knowledge  base  to  shift  to  how Cryptocurrencies offer  a completely alternative and exciting domain of money. The internet of money, so to say.

1.In  the first  half of  the  course  the  student  will  thoroughly understand  the  reasons why  banks  partner  with fintech companies  in  the  fields  of  payments,  insurance, lending, and digital KYC processes

2.In  the second  half of  the  course  the  student  will  be  able  to  clearly identify  and locate  the  historical  foundations of blockchain  technology and some  theoretical approaches in regards to the Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystems.

Disasters continue to increase in frequency and intensity, consequently posing a lot of challenges in the achievement of sustainable development. Losses are caused in terms of human, economic, cultural and social assets. Disasters interrupt the normal way a community functions, which makes the post-disaster phase crucial in recovering and rebuilding all connected elements, from the physical reconstruction to the revitalization of the social dimension, aiming at efficient and sustainable outcomes. DRR and DRM policies should focus on communities and community participation in the decision-making process to obtain an effective and positive recovery, reducing future disaster risks. Governance and management are crucial tools required to be able to implement DRM policies. Hence, decisions taken in the post-disaster phase influence people’s participation and have long-term impacts on the affected community and on the built environment.

Italy is one of the countries with highest risk to disasters in Europe. This research discusses the relation between community involvement and the Italian post-disaster recovery and reconstruction management. The case study chosen, L’ Aquila, which was hit by an earthquake in 2009, has become a symbolic example at the national level of the need for community involvement and of the role of bottom-up initiatives in the social reconstruction of the city. The articulation of community participation in post-earthquake scenarios in the country is also analysed through four additional Italian examples.

Through a critical review of the literature and a qualitative analysis of interviews with ten exponents from the community of L’ Aquila, this research addresses the question of how community participation and its positive effects could be included in a meaningful way in the Italian recovery and reconstruction policies. This thesis presents some areas for improvement to integrate the community’s perspective into post disaster management and a set of recommendations for future actions.

Drawing upon academic literature, synthesise and evaluate current understandings of future risk management in an organisational development context. Include a discussion with respect to developing either organisational robustness or antifragility, or a combination of both. Your discussion should be in the context of organisational development and change.

"Choose policies not for what they intend to do, but for how people react to them."

To be able to design policies, technologies and organizational structures that protect us from risk rather than exposing us to it after second-order effects are taken into account, we need to understand why people and organization take risks and how they become more or less vulnerable to them. People and organization are complex entities, and damage has complex effects upon them. Some forms of damage kill them and other ones make them stronger. Some form of protection protect them, whereas others make them take more risk, eventually resulting in tragedies.

Classical behavioral economics often uses one or more assumptions not representative of the real world: static monolithic players playing single gambles single times with known static odds. This paper discards these assumptions and instead considers complex players made of multiple levels of components (e.g., muscle fibers for humans or citizens for cities) with non-homogenous and anisotropic internal structures, exposed to multiple risks (social, financial, reproductive, etc), engaged in multiple repeated interactions with unknown dynamic odds and who undergo plastic changes in both their physique and in their behavior when damaged or rewarded.

This paper adopts a bottom-up approach to build a coherent and comprehensive framework to estimate the long-term effect of policies, technologies and organizational structures on the risk-taking behavior of people and organization in the real world and on their ultimate survival. In particular, it focuses on how damage can both make them stronger or weaker, more or less prone to take risks, and on what it depends.

In this article, some general conceptual issues regarding the relevance of antifragility for sustainable development and organizational sustainability are developed. This is done against the background of the general research hypothesis which is the basis for future research, requiring a paradigm shift from resilience of systems and organizations towards antifragility: Antifragility is the basis of intra-and intergenerational sustainability as well as long-term survival. More is needed than resilience, which rather focuses on the capacity and capability to recover from different shocks. Sustainability strategies should focus on the prevention or elimination of unsustainable activities or fragilities, replacing them, when necessary, with less unsustainable activities. This is a first step in enabling organizations or systems to handle unexpected future events, potentially threatening their existence.

This commentary focuses on a complementary theoretical– experimental approach to the target article by Hill, Den Hartigh, Meijer, De Jonge, and Van Yperen (2018). In the target article, the authors develop an initial roadmap for identifying persistent behavioral patterns (i.e., athletic resilience) through measurements to identify specific attractor states and/or the attractor landscape. The goal of this approach is to promote a more complete understanding of the underlying attractor dynamics that give rise to resilient behavior. We extend the thesis of the target article via the concept of metastability. Metastable dynamics are the result of the system remaining poised on the edge of criticality. We argue that metastability is key for positively adapted behavior and, ultimately, successful athletic performance. When considered in this light, positive adaptations to adversity (i.e., resilience) are the minimum outcome, with performance enhancement in the face of adversity as the true performance goal. Such growth from adversity is termed antifragility. We next couch this concept in the context of evolutionary biology to leverage biological hormesis as a stress-response model for athletic performance. This allows for biology-inspired fitness profiles that provide a quantifiable measure of stress response relative to environmental change. From there, phenotypic plasticity can be calculated to further elucidate the relation between adversity and performance responses as a quantifiable index of antifragility. Finally, this approach is discussed in the context of personalized training interventions that facilitate the emergence of metastable dynamics that underlie phenotypic plasticity, with critical training windows introduced as opportunities to increase athletic antifragility.

We review the concept of ecosystem resilience in its relation to ecosystem integrity from an information theory approach. We summarize the literature on the subject identifying three main narratives: ecosystem properties that enable them to be more resilient; ecosystem response to perturbations; and complexity. We also include original ideas with theoretical and quantitative developments with application examples. The main contribution is a new way to rethink resilience, that is mathematically formal and easy to evaluate heuristically in real-world applications: ecosystem antifragility. An ecosystem is antifragile if it benefits from environmental variability. Antifragility therefore goes beyond robustness or resilience because while resilient/robust systems are merely perturbation-resistant, antifragile structures not only withstand stress but also benefit from it.

Innovation is the ability to conjure immutable systems on top of other immutable systems via layering.The primary difference between natural systems and human systems is the availability of immutable and stateless subsystems. For example, do we run out of protons or gravity? they, cause other predictive systems to be created from the inherent value they provide. Human systems, however, fade over time due to the fog of unpredictability. Humans are capable of conjuring up or creating highly resilient systems that become immutable over time as its ability to resist state change grows. Money is an example of this.

Ramezani J., Camarinha-Matos L.M. A collaborative approach to resilient and antifragile business ecosystems. Abstract Turbulence and unexpected disruptive events are showing with an increasing frequency and growing impact, which represent major challenges for sustainability of businesses. Therefore, finding how organizations can strive and even improve or gain benefits in disruptive environment scenarios became a relevant research area, for which resilience and antifragility represent two significant approaches. This paper argues that collaboration in business ecosystems is a promising approach to cope with disruptions. A brief overview of existing strategies as potential building blocks for resilience and antifragility is presented. Then, in order to study the strategies that can better apply, a modelling and simulation framework based on multi-agents and system dynamics is introduced, and the main modelling issues are discussed considering the context of Industry 4.0.

Through history, numerous events have taught us that the beliefs we once thought to be certainties were in fact mistaken, due to a lack of information. Still, in many occasions we tend to fall into the same cycle, believing that this time around we are actually on the right side of things, and that our newly acquired knowledge is a part of the progression to the betterment of humanity. The present research simply intends to present an example from the popular world of sports that shows how little we actually know about some of the simplest of things, and how one single case is enough to disregard decades of assumed scientific certainty. This interdisciplinary approach to Usain Bolt's case only attempts to shed some light in our ignorance, and specially in our pretentious assumptions regarding human knowledge.

In 2008 Chris Anderson wrote a provocative piece titled TheEnd of Theory. The idea being that we no longer need to abstract and hypothesis; we simply need to let machines lead us to the patterns, trends, and relationships in social, economic, political, and environmental relationships. According to Anderson, the new availability of huge amounts of data offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models and unified theories. But numbers, contrary to Anderson’s assertion, do not, in fact, speak for themselves. From the neuroscience’s standpoint, every choice we make is a reflection of an, often unstated, set of assumptions and hypotheses about what we want and expect from the data: no assertion, no prediction, no decision making is possible without an a priori opinion, without a project. Data-driven science essentially refers to the application of mathematics and technology on data to extract insights for problems, which are very clearly defined. In the real world, however, not all problems are such. To help solve them, one needs to understand and appreciate the context. The problem of landscape becomes, for this reason, critical and decisive. It requires an interdisciplinary approach consisting of several different competencies and skills.

Based on ideas and notions discussed in Nassim Taleb's books The Black Swan and Antifragile, in this article it is discussed how theories from the new institutional economics can contribute to research on sustainability issues in different areas as well as corporate social responsibility. While sustainability is often considered from the point of view of resilience, the increasing complexity of the world requires to be prepared for unexpected challenges and unpredictable challenges which may lead to crises or system ruin. The focus in this article is on the identification of fragilities as the bottom line of sustainable development – their elimination may prevent ruin and support system survival. This is based on the idea that not only policy for development may be senseless when the possibility of ruin exists. In general, it is also easier to identify problems than possible improvements. The theoretical framework of the new institutional economics will be used to outline some opportunities and challenges for identifying fragilities and creating indicators of unsustainability.

In complex adaptive systems, antifragility designates the positive sensitivity to volatility, caused by (exceptional or ‘black swan’) external stressors that intervene with the intended functionality of these systems. System Engineers can purposefully employ the concept antifragility to engender better systems. Prerequisite for this is the ability to adequately assess system changes and especially system improvements as the consequence of stressors. Albeit antifragility measurements do exist, their practicality is limited. This publication proposes a novel approach for antifragility measurement. A case study on a manufacturing SME depicts the antifragile spectrum rating of an SME to test the effects of system changes.

La pandemia reciente del COVID-19 es uno de los grandes retos que enfrenta la humanidad, dicha cuestión pudo haberse prevenido (a pesar que al día de hoy se le de la categoría inmerecida de ser "un Cisne Negro") pero debido a algunos sesgos conductuales así como enfoques reduccionistas ha ido agravándose hasta tener el panorama actual en Europa y, quizá próximamente, Europa.
Este escrito aborda y refuta objetivamente dichos enfoques.

This article aims to reflect on how dying and the perception of death in the COVID-19 pandemic
have changed in Piedmont (Italy). It explores how the relatives have been deprived of the
possibility of accompanying the corpses and practicing the funeral ritual of the deceased; and
how a new form of ‘death education’ has become necessary in times of isolation.

Today's business world is continuously challenged by unexpected disruptive events, which are increasing in their frequency and effects. As a consequence, it is plausible to foresee future scenarios in which turbulence and instability are no longer considered as episodic crises, but rather somewhat the "norm" or the default status. This trend naturally raises the question of how organizations can strive and even gain in such disruptive environments, and which characteristics are required for combating disruptions. Resilience and antifragility are two emerging approaches to handle disruptions. Through a literature review, this paper identifies several strategies that contribute to business ecosystem's resilience or antifragility. Furthermore, it is also shown that contributions from a number of disciplinary areas, including Collaborative Networks, Systems Thinking, Thermodynamics, Management science, and ICT, can provide complementary views and support. A set of promising examples of applications of the discussed approaches are presented and briefly analyzed. Finally, a number of open questions and directions for further research are presented.

Today's business world is continuously challenged by unexpected disruptive events, which are increasing in their frequency and effects. As a consequence, it is plausible to foresee future scenarios in which turbulence and instability are no longer considered as episodic crises, but rather somewhat the "norm" or the default status. This trend naturally raises the question of how organizations can strive and even gain in such disruptive environments, and which characteristics are required for combating disruptions. Resilience and antifragility are two emerging approaches to handle disruptions. Through a literature review, this paper identifies several strategies that contribute to business ecosystem's resilience or antifragility. Furthermore, it is also shown that contributions from a number of disciplinary areas, including Collaborative Networks, Systems Thinking, Thermodynamics, Management science, and ICT, can provide complementary views and support. A set of promising examples of applications of the discussed approaches are presented and briefly analyzed. Finally, a number of open questions and directions for further research are presented.

A major challenge facing La Trobe University  in the 21st century is not only how to manage risk effectively but also how to embrace it and grow from adverse past experiences. Not only is risk fundamental in all organisations but it is also a key component of key decision making (La Trobe University 2015) . Education has formally been an “antifragile” industry sector that has mostly withstood the malaise of economic downturns (Owens 2013). This has normally been due to government funding , grants and subsidized student loans (Shinn 1986; Fernandez & Rogerson 1995). Recently however, universities have been plagued with dropping student numbers, high failure rates and high dropout rates (Owens 2013; Corporation 2015b). This has several spillover costs for the economy such as billions wasted in government grants that could have been used elsewhere, and an under-educated workforce (Owens 2013; Corporation 2015b; Araque et al. 2009). This paper will argue that La Trobe University should apply Taleb’s notion of antifragility into its risk management portfolio to withstand shocks and volatility in a changing education environment.

Our envisioning of the brink of Singularity begins with redefining Singularity as an historical process, rather than an event. It is the process of continuous intelligence expansion since the beginning of human civilization. We emphasize the value and significance of the continuity of this process rather than the intermediate stages through which it passes. By that, we position the brink of Singularity situation within the continuum of human evolution, the evolution of life and evolution as a universal process. We raise the question of what would be the desired configuration and dynamics of the sociotechnological system able to facilitate open-ended intelligence expansion. A World of Views is our vision of
such a configuration. We then argue why a World of Views is likely to be the only feasible configuration capable of sustaining the Singularity as a process of intelligence escaping its biological constraints and beyond. Finally, we propose
distributed social governance as a bootstrapping mechanism for a World of Views and link it with the current momentum of the sociotechnological system. At the basis of the evolutionary shift humanity is undergoing on the brink of Singularity is the progressive process of entering into symbiotic relationships
with its technological artifacts. This symbiotic convergence deemphasizes the anthropocentric perspective in regard to the future. Furthermore, the past consensual understanding of what constitutes our humanity cannot serve us effectively under circumstances of accelerating sociotechnological change. From the social perspective, the most important are those artifacts that augment social interaction of intelligent agents as currently the Internet primarily is. Such artifacts do not only change us individually, they transform the very fabric of human civilization. We take therefore a systemic approach, first by focusing our discussion on the dynamics of the sociotechnological organism humanity is becoming, and second by introducing worldviews as the relevant units of
evolution of sociotechnological organisms.
Our analysis of the sociotechnological evolution shows that circumstances of hyper-connectivity, reflexivity and acceleration beyond their many obvious benefits expose the sociotechnological system to fragility that will only increase in
the near future and may lead to some catastrophic though yet unpredictable consequences. In order to counter this systemic effect we apply the concept of antifragility - the property of systems that thrive on volatility and uncertainty -
and conclude that antifragility is necessary to secure the sociotechnological system from devastating catastrophic events. To that end, we need a paradigm shift towards what we call a World of Views. A World of Views is a nested, self-
organizing structure, where worldviews occupy the highest level but in themselves are modular, open and diverse. Diversity, modularity and openness are the essential properties that together characterize an adaptive structure
capable of containing failures while propagating successes within the larger system, thus realizing antifragility at multiple scales. An antifragile sociotechnological system, however, is much more than just dodging existential risks. We argue that the benefits of technology will gradually transport humanity into an age of abundance, which will in turn have profound
effects on sociotechnological evolution. This self-amplifying reciprocity will result in decline and even disappearance of evolutionary pressures that arise from limited resources and survival needs. We propose that abundance will catalyze
active expressions of freedom that will become novel evolutionary selectors. In our vision of the future, the expression of freedom rather than survival is the ultimate driving force of evolution. We conclude that the World of Views is a catalyst of future abundance, which in turn reinforces the dynamics intrinsic of the World of Views. This positive feedback mechanism, once set in motion, will bootstrap the sociotechnological system towards a World of Views. 
Finally, we introduce in broad lines a distributed social governance system that we foresee as instrumental to the development of a World of Views. Distributed social governance system is the implementation of a World of Views
on the social plane. It is a radical extension of a democratic governance regime in a sense of abolishing the single unified paradigm, in favor of continuous construction and dismantling of experimental models that partially work. It is clear to us that global education systems are the essential key towards distributed social governance, teaching us to live in a world without survival constraints, giving up the idea of a single value system, constructing individual and shared realities and constantly innovating on them.

Based on ideas and notions discussed in Nassim Taleb’s books The Black Swan and Antifragile, in this article it is discussed how theories from the new institutional economics can contribute to research on sustainability issues in different areas as well as corporate social responsibility. While sustainability is often considered from the point of view of resilience, the increasing complexity of the world requires to be prepared for unexpected challenges and unpredictable challenges which may lead to crises or system ruin. The focus in this article is on the identification of fragilities as the bottom line of sustainable development – their elimination may prevent ruin and support system survival. This is based on the idea that not only policy for development may be senseless when the possibility of ruin exists. In general, it is also easier to identify problems than possible improvements. The theoretical framework of the new institutional economics will be used to outline some oppor...

Contemporary business ecosystems are continuously challenged by unexpected disruptive events, which are increasing in their frequency and effects. A critical question is why do some organizations collapse in face of extreme events, while others not? On the other hand, current engineering and socio-technical systems were designed to operate in "mostly stable" situations; sporadic instability and disturbances are at best captured by exception handling mechanisms, focusing on reliability and robustness. Recent and more ambitious design goals, however, aim at building systems that are expected to cope with severe disruptions, and survive or even thrive in a context of volatility and uncertainty. This led to an increasing attention to the concepts of resilience and antifragility. As such, this article introduces the findings of a comprehensive literature survey aimed at shedding light on emerging concepts and approaches to handle disruptions in business ecosystems. Main contributions include a clarification of related concepts, identification and classification of disruption sources and drivers, and extensive lists of strategies and underlying capabilities to cope with disruptions. Related perspectives and approaches developed in multiple knowledge areas are also analysed and synthesized. Finally, a collection of engineered systems implementing promising approaches to increase resilience and antifragility are presented.

European territories are crossed by an uneven transition that highlights new geographies of inequalities, fragilities, and fragmentations. Public spaces are one of the core features of European culture, and today several events threaten their everyday body-scale dimension, exacerbating risk perception. This paper shows some preliminary outcomes of my ongoing PhD research, that digs a new spatial-relational strand involving the concept of antifragility. Introduced in opposition to the notion of fragility, antifragility describes the capacity of getting better from shocks taking advantage of volatility by dealing with randomness, disorder, and unpredictability.
The paper deepens some specific antifragility features (i.e. the ability to learn from errors, the capacity of gaining from disorder –maintaining a certain degree of uncertainty–, as well as optionality and redundancy as methods to reduce shock exposure). The paper investigates the spatial value and design potential of these features through some remarkable public spaces recently built in Europe. The aim is to show not only the potentialities of antifragility as a design issue but also that public space is still the best environment in Europe to activate new urban dialogues –considered as the sum of social actions and spatial forms that co-design publicness.