Planned Empty
Nassim Taleb taught us about antifragility: systems that gain from disorder. But most teams do the opposite.
Systems don't fail linearly—they snap. Like Taleb's turkey, fed daily until Thanksgiving, teams can appear stable until they suddenly break.
Every team has a breaking point—the antifragility threshold. Below it, stress strengthens. Above it, stress destroys. You can measure this line. Most don't.
This headroom creates:
- Learning: Room to turn chaos into knowledge
- Innovation: Freedom to experiment safely
- Protection: Shield against crisis cascade
Like Taleb's barbells strategy—teams need both stability and room for volatility. Without this balance, they become fragile.
Measure Your Threshold
Four steps to safety:
- Measure planned versus reactive work
- Find your breaking point
- Time your crisis recoveries
- Stay below it
Extreme optimization creates fragility. True robustness comes from slack in the system.
Taleb writes: "Redundancy looks like waste until something unusual happens. Something unusual always happens."
Your most vital metric isn't efficiency. It's your capacity to absorb randomness and gain from it.
Where's your threshold?
Are you measuring it?