Becoming antifragile is more important than ever in disruptive times

This presentation maps out what antifragility means for the profession of the modern business analyst. Antifragility is not the same as robustness or resilience: it goes a significant step further.

An antifragile system or organisation doesn’t just withstand unexpected events, malfunctions and errors, it grows stronger because of them — in short, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Yet most organisations and systems are designed to handle only known risks. Process designers and IT departments invest heavily in preventing failure, but what happens if a system is designed on the assumption that every component can and will fail, and random failures are deliberately injected to test that system’s resilience? Netflix’s Chaos Monkey is one of the best-known technical examples of this approach in action.

This session examines what this mindset means for business analysis, for the six BABOK knowledge areas, and especially for Strategy Analysis and Solution Evaluation — how antifragile an organisation should actually aim to become, and to what extent organisations are willing to invest in getting there. Jan de Vries explores what it takes to become antifragile both organisationally and technically.

Key Takeaways

• Not every part of a business or IT landscape deserves the same protection; classifying what’s fragile, stable, resilient or antifragile shows where to actually invest.
• Apply the Barbell strategy: keep roughly 90% of the operation a hyper-stable, boring core, put a deliberate 10% into higher-risk experimentation, and avoid the mediocre middle that’s neither safe nor bold enough to pay off.
• Microservices and best-of-breed strategies aren’t just technical choices, they’re bets on antifragility — staying able to swap components or suppliers without the whole operation grinding to a halt.
• Chaos engineering and error budgets work together to turn failure into a tool: deliberately injecting controlled volatility exposes weaknesses on your own terms, while treating an error budget as evolutionary pressure (not a mistake-avoidance target) shows how much of that volatility can be afforded.
• The highest-value move is often subtraction: cutting a feature or supplier dependency that no longer justifies its cost, or paying down a layer of technical debt that is pure cost with no benefit.
• Cutting red tape, pushing decisions closer to the people doing the work, and giving teams real ownership of the consequences of their choices matters just as much as any technology investment.
• Cross-functional, T-shaped skills are the strongest defence against the bus factor and silo-driven fragility.
• Optimising for Mean Time To Recovery, rather than an unrealistic Mean Time Between Failures, builds a more adaptive business.

About the Speaker

Jan de Vries is a senior trainer, business IT consultant, coach, researcher and public speaker in the fields of Agile, DevOps, Business Information Management, Service Management, Antifragility and Strategy Development. He founded BlueOceanRecon.com to facilitate the development of Blue Oceans and Lean Startups, and Antifragility.works to conduct research on the practical application of antifragility in organisations.