Don’t outsource your own disruption
/Delighted for the opportunity to kick off the technology track at Transcending the Crisis last week in front of a global audience.
My takeaway—don’t outsource your own disruption.
In Black Swan, Nassim Taleb outlined the challenges of dealing with the highly improbable. In Antifragile, he offers one solution. To quote the author, “Complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors.”
My interpretation—what disrupts us makes us stronger.
Some things we once thought of as highly improbable have recently come to pass. And we’re only half-way through the year. Every business—every society—has been disrupted by factors beyond our control.
When you’re living history in the raw, it’s tough to predict the way things will shape up. And that’s the point—it’s rarely possible to predict the future with enough certainty to give us complete confidence.
The only alternative is to get confident with uncertainty.
Challenge your assumptions
Use this crisis (or any other) as a springboard for developing your own anti-fragility:
Disrupt yourself and your business by asking when will your customers—or your employer—no longer need your help?
What small, deliberate failures can you pursue to learn and adapt?
What will you do about it?
For more on this, see the excerpt from Trusting Technology just published in Training Mag— Confidence is All.