Here's the second principle to becoming antifragile: Above all, cut the downside. Antifragility begins by 'clipping' the downside; by finding a way to make it so that 'the unacceptable' can never happen. Before we go on, note that this makes sense in a purely logical sense: if you can make it so that you can't lose, then (on a long enough time scale), you can only win.
But how? This massively depends on your context. The most important question to answer is, 'what are the unacceptable outcomes for us'? What, if it happened, would put a definitive end to your organisation? Taking on debt? Losing a certain skill set? Losing a certain competitive advantage?
Once you have answered this question with clarity, it becomes much more straightforward to find a way to eliminate (or significantly reduce) the chances of that happening. This may be a form of insurance, an acquisition, recruitment, or even a simple strategy of insisting on a certain level of margin in operations, cash, etc. We will return to margin later in this series, but note in passing that, if losing a particular skill set would 'kill' what you're doing, a simple way to clip that downside is to create a surplus of that skill set - whether through internal training, or additional recruitment. That way, if an individual with precious skills leaves for any reason, the downside won't hit so hard - if at all.
In summary, the principle of clipping downsides is absurdly simple - yet rarely practised, for the reason that clipping downsides rarely seems very impressive, dynamic, or ‘successful’. Paradoxically, a large part of being sure to win over the long term (a useful working definition of what it means to be antifragile) is simply to be sure that you can't lose. It is ironic, then, that even very high-flying organisations can come to sudden failure all because they focused on 'winning' to the exclusion of 'not losing'.
What's your Achille's Heel, and how can you insure against it? Do that and you'll be exponentially more antifragile.
Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash