In the Digital world, just being resilient is no longer enough: we need to be antifragile.
Resilience comes from the Latin word resilire, which means “returning to a normal state”: in a world where we experiment more, and fail more as a consequence, organizations and leaders cannot just return to their previous state after a mistake, but they need to learn and become stronger.
This is antifragility, namely, our ability to reinforce ourselves through chaos, errors, uncertainty – as economist Nassim Taleb well laid out in his famous book.
Therefore, in order to become antifragile, we first need to understand that not every mistake is bad (and in the keynote, Andrea describes the 3 major categories of mistakes, following the model of Amy Edmondson from Harvard Business School), as well as he proposes a new model of interpretation of mistakes, which considers:
- a mistakes as a natural by-product of an innovation process, and as an informative result that teaches us something;
- a good professional is measured by his ability to learn from mistakes;
- the leader’s role becomes one of maximizing learning from mistakes.
