Today’s insights are brought to you by my colleague and futurist, Graeme Codrington.
I get knocked down. But I get up again… Be honest, you didn’t just read that – you sang it.
This is the essence of resilience, and if there’s ever been a time when resilience was needed it’s been the past three years. Rightly so. Many of you and your organisations have been remarkably resilient, toughing out some of the most difficult times we’ve ever experienced: personally, and professionally. You’re never going to keep me down.
But as we look ahead to 2023, we need more than resilience. We need to be antifragile.
We don’t have the word “antifragile” in our language. We know what fragile is: if you hit or drop it, it will break. We know what resilient or robust is: if you hit it, it won’t break. We might get knocked down, but we get back up, dust ourselves off, and are ready to go again.
Antifragile is more than this: when we take a hit, we get stronger. We gain from disorder and chaos; we get better during tough times. We don’t just endure – we thrive through disruption.
I don’t know about you, but I am tired of being merely resilient. I’m tired of taking a hit, even though I am confident I can get back up again, albeit bruised, battered, and tired. Antifragility is also about being able to anticipate the hits that are coming, and do our best to avoid them, pre-emptively building systems and responses that allow us to flourish rather than fail when things don’t go according to plan.
I think we should make antifragility the goal of 2023 – personally and in our teams and organisations. Even better if we can do this for the countries we live in – most of which seem to be seriously stressed at the moment.
In next week’s Tuesday Insights email, I’ll share what our team at TomorrowToday has seen in our most antifragile clients. We’ve been privileged to work with some remarkable organisations over the past three years, often being part of the reason, they’ve had their best years ever, and we’ve been able to identify the characteristics of antifragile people and organisations. We’ll share that next week. But for today, I have a simple suggestion for a powerful year end review session for you and your team:
ACTION: Get your team together sometime before the year end break, and have a meeting with only one agenda item on it:
* What are the three most significant things we did during Covid that we should continue to do for the foreseeable future?
Explain the concept of antifragility to your team (I will include a short video explanation with next week’s email, if that assists you), so that you help them to frame the conversation with this concept in mind. You’re really looking for them to identify activities, habits, systems, and structures that not only helped you survive Covid but hopefully made you stronger and better for it. You’re wanting to take some time to learn the lessons of the crazy disruption we’ve lived through, and ensure you keep the stuff that makes you antifragile. You can extend the conversation to things you wish you had done, or things you know you need to be doing (or not doing) in 2023.
Trust us: this time spent on reflection will NOT be wasted and may end up being your best team meeting of the year. If you’d like some help facilitating it, we can assist – just contact our team.
By the way, if you’d like people in your team to receive the TomorrowToday Insights email every Tuesday, let them know that they can sign up below:
Author of today’s tip, Graeme Codrington, is an internationally recognized futurist, specializing in the future of work. He helps organizations understand the forces that will shape our lives in the next ten years, and how we can respond in order to confidently stay ahead of change.
For the past two decades, Graeme has worked with some of the world’s most recognized brands, travelling to over 80 countries in total, and speaking to around 100,000 people every year. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, and on faculty at 5 top global business schools.