“This asymmetry means that the fragile suffers a disproportionate amount of downside from shocks.”
Source: Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World
“Decentralized systems can offer more resilience and antifragility, as this single point of failure does not exist.”
Source: Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World
“Developing antifragility means focusing on the amplitude of potential consequences, not the probability.”
Source: Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World
“Resilience is a prerequisite to antifragility.”
Source: Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World
“Faith is the very first thing you should pack in a hope chest.”
“Many man-made systems, including ICT systems, have positive feedback loops that cause certain local events to propagate and create extreme global behaviors. The extreme behaviors, especially unplanned downtime, become more common than stakeholders can accept. These outliers are modeled by probability distributions with thick tails. Unfortunately, classical methods for risk analysis based on predictions of future events tend to underestimate or ignore extreme global behaviors in complex adaptive ICT systems, even though these events may very well dominate the overall risk to stakeholders.”
Source: Anti-fragile ICT Systems
“... we should develop and operate so-called anti-fragile systems characterized by two important properties: First, an anti-fragile ICT system fails early with a small, local impact to break positive feedback loops before they can create extreme global behaviors. Second, the prevention of extreme global behaviors allows stakeholders to learn from small-impact incidents about new vulnerabilities caused by changes in the system and its environment. The vulnerabilities can then be mitigated to avoid future extreme behaviors.”
Source: Anti-fragile ICT Systems
“Two examples illustrate the redundancy principle. First, when a virtual machine fails in a cloud-based system, an identical instance is started automatically. Second, a critically important system should have at least one secondary backup system that runs in parallel with the primary system to ensure a safe fallback. Leading up to the next principle, we note that the secondary system should differ from the primary system to avoid both failing for the same reasons.”
Source: Anti-fragile ICT Systems
“Note that there is not a focus on eliminating failures. Systems without failures, although robust, become brittle and fragile. When failures occur, it is more likely that the teams responding will be unprepared, and this could dramatically increase the impact of the incident.”
Source: Database Reliability Engineering: Designing and Operating Resilient Database Systems
“Further, the random element in trial and error is not quite random, if it is carried out rationally, using error as a source of information. if every trial provides you with information about what does not work, you start zooming in on a solution - so every attempt becomes more valuable, more like an expense than an error. And of course you make discoveries along the way.”
Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder