The adaptive nature of organizations life cycle combines a continuous improvement phase oriented to efficiency and an renewal phase oriented to innovation with a lot of disorder. To profit from disorder and not only resist, an antifragile strategy is introduced to help organizations getting stronger like natural ecosystems such as forests.

1. BE VERY EFFICIENT AND
INNOVATIVE
THANKS TO DISORDER!
Xavier Warzee - Scrum Conseil
31 October 2014 - Agile Tour Brussels

2. Xavier Warzee
• Web : http://www.scrumconseil.fr
• Twitter : @xwarzee
• LinkedIn : http://www.linkedin.com/in/xwarzee
• Email : xwarzee@scrumconseil.fr

3. HOW ORGANIZATIONS
EVOLVE?
According to Seth Godin

4. Struggle
At the beginning, no one
knows what you make or
why they need it. … But
the struggle is always
there. …

5. Servant
As a soon-to-be-
successful organization
gains traction, it has a
choice. It can move to
servant mode, delighting
and connecting
customers, exceeding
expectations and
performing what seems
like miracles. …

6. Bully
As the organization
gains power (and
constituents) it is under
pressure to increase
profits and market share
and lock in. … “We
make the rules now.”

7. Utility
No organization stays in
bully mode forever. The
step after this is utility,
the organization that
serves a function,
makes a profit, and is
often taken for granted.

8. What after Utility?
Go Nowhere Go Somewhere

9. Nowhere / Somewhere

10. Solution for organization to survive?

11. “Organizations as Ecosystems:
Probing the Value of a
Metaphor”
by Matthew Mars, Judith Bronstein,
Robert Lusch
Havard Business Review

12. HOW ECOSYSTEMS
EVOLVE?
According to Lance H. Gunderson and C. S. Holling

15. Much
Little

16. Cf. Resilience Alliance
http://www.resalliance.org/index.php/adaptive_cycle

17. Value maximization in the adaptive cycle

18. Value renewal in the adaptive cycle

20. Seth’s Path Adaptive Cycle Practices Organizational culture
Struggle – no one knows what you make
or why they need it
Collapse or release (Ω) – the
established order breaks down
and uncertainty increases
Lean Startup Learning
Servant – delighting and connecting
customers, exceeding expectations and
performing what seems like miracles
Reorganization (α) – new players
and alternatives emerge Agile
Collaboration /
Empowerment
Bully – under pressure to increase
profits and market share and lock in
Growth or exploitation (r) – a
period of growth and
competition among
entrepreneurs and survivors
previous cycles
Expertizes Competence
Utility – serves a function, makes a
profit, and is often taken for granted
Conservation (K) – the winners
consolidate and then maintain
the existing order
Process Command & Control

21. A “crisis” always happens even for
leading organizations

22. A FIRST TRY TO AVOID
CRISIS
Systems/Organizations as Complex Adaptive Systems

23. Systems/Organizations needs
Efficiency
•to be managed to
limit resource usage
i.e. they need to be
efficient
Productivity
•to be managed to
optimize time to
develop itself
Robustness
•maintain critical
functionality in the
face of significant
stress
Innovation
•ability to generate
disruptive,
qualitative and
fundamental
improvements
which enables it to
undergo
transformational
change

24. Robustness
Ability to
Innovate
Resilience

25. Resilience Stability
Efficiency
Productivity
Robustness
Ability to
Innovate

26. HOW TO MITIGATE BETWEEN
RESILIENCE AND STABILITY?

27. The essence of control is the
elimination of disorder
Efficiency and stability are
both fundamental to control

28. To the extent that the control
process and the model that
guides this process are
accurate and reliable, control
itself delivers stability.

29. To the extent that the model is
inaccurate i.e. to the extent that
the map does not match the
territory,
the system needs to maintain
some slack and redundancy to
buffer against environmental
changes that are not
anticipated by the model.

30. FROM STABILITY TO
FRAGILITY

31. Extended periods of stability
and, by extension, policies that
focus on stabilization frequently
end in collapse.

32. Examples of this phenomenon
• forests transformed across the country
into a veritable tinderbox prone to
increasingly catastrophic fires.
Suppression of forest fires
in the United States
• But an increasing frequency of
catastrophic floods.
Levees and embankments
on many of the world’s
rivers may have succeeding
in controlling their path in
normal years
• the prelude to the deepest economic
recession since the Great Depression.
The economic ‘Great
Moderation’ that the
developed economies
enjoyed since the 80s
turned

33. Attempt to control CAS
> Simplification of German Forest
Illegible,
complex
Legible,
simplified

34. Control
Simplification
/ Legibility

35. Eventual Illegibility of Control Process
• Fragile
• Deteriorating
Productivity
• Illegible,
Complex
Domain due to
complexity of
control process
and past
interventions
Late Control
• Fragile
• High
Productivity
• Legible,
Simplified
Domaine
Initial Control
• Resilient
• Low/Moderate
Productivity
• Illegible,
Complex
Domain
Pre-Control

36. FROM FRAGILE TO
ANTIFRAGILE

37. The leaping frog
Porcelain Brass Real

38. The leaping frog after earthquake
Fragile Robust Antifragile

41. Muscles are
Adaptive
The Body is
Antifragile

42. Learning is Adaptive

43. “The only sustainable competitive
advantage is an organization's
ability to learn faster than the
competition.”
Peter M. Senge,
The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of
The Learning Organization

44. IT Systems Perfection

45. Enlightenment Bias
Sub-parts of a complex system are
simpler
A stable system is made from very
hard & durable sub-parts

46. “Stability is a Time Bomb”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

47. Adaptive Systems crave Exercise

48. Forests are Adaptive

49. Monocultures are Fragile

50. “Nature loves small error, humans
don’t — hence when you rely on
human judgment you are at the
mercy of a mental bias that disfavors
antifragility.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

51. Enforcing a single best practice on the
organization, can make it …
fragile

52. Fragile
• Fragile things are typically large
• Responses to variability and stress come from the outside
• Fragile things are overly optimized
• Fragile people and systems seek to eliminate variability,
noise, and tension

53. Fragile
Things that are fragile
break or suffer from
chaos and randomness.
Fragile
systems/people/things
seek out tranquility
because they have more
to lose than to gain
during volatile times.

54. Antifragile
• Less is usually more with antifragility
• Responses to variability and stress are built into the
antifragile
• Antifragile things have built-in redundancies
• Nature and tradition do a good job of creating antifragility

55. Antifragile
Things that are
antifragile grow and
strengthen from volatility
and stress (to a point).
When people or systems
are antifragile, there’s
more upside than
downside when Black
Swan events occur.
Antifragile systems feed
on chaos and
uncertainty like a
primordial god.

56. How to become antifragile ?
• Intentionally inject stress in your life
• Add redundancies in your life
• Employ the “barbell strategy”
• 90% of your wealth in robust investments that are rock-solid,
• and the last 10% spread around a number of highly speculative
investments that have big upsides – be part of the “black Swan”
• Never take advice from someone who doesn’t have “skin
in the game.”
• Practice via negativa
• Keep your options open

57. ANTIFRAGILITY @
GOOGLE

65. PROJECT “CURIOSITY”
@ TOYOTA

66. Toyota - Entering the US market
NUMMI and the Adaptive Cycle

67. Toyota - Entering the luxury

68. Toyota - Against the trend with Hybrids

70. References
• Diamond, Jared M. Collapse: How Societies Choose to
Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking Press, 2005.
• Gunderson, Lance H. and C.S. Holling, Eds. Panarchy:
Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural
Systems. Washington: Island Press, 2002.
• Resilience Alliance and Santa Fe Institute. 2004.
Thresholds and alternate states in ecological and social-
ecological systems. Resilience Alliance. (Online.) URL:
http://www.resalliance.org/index.php?id=183

71. References Web
• Count to 4… and repeat!
• http://atfortytwo.com/2014/10/23/count-to-4-and-repeat/
• Resilience: Adaptation on the Rebound
• http://nmnh.typepad.com/rogers_archaeology_lab/2012/12/resilience.h
tml
• Panarchy: Out with the Old, In with the New
• http://nmnh.typepad.com/rogers_archaeology_lab/2013/02/panarchy.ht
ml
• Creative Destruction: Think like a Forest!
• http://thenatureofbusiness.org/2013/02/06/creative-destruction-think-
like-a-forest/