Some systems gain from volatility and stress; robustness merely withstands it.
Taleb's contrast: a teacup is fragile, a rock is robust, an immune system is antifragile because exposure to pathogens strengthens it. Most institutions are built for robustness and mistake it for the third thing.
In practice
- A team that has survived three genuine outages debugs faster than one that has never had a bad night, because the runbooks were written under fire.
- A small restaurant that gets its worst review in year one and rewrites the menu outlasts the one that opened to praise.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Risk & Reliability
- Essay
- How accidents actually happen