Welcome to the Fragile / Antifragile and Paradigm shift assessment. The purpose of this assessment is to increase the awareness of what our survival brain tends to filter out.
You can select any entity for this analysis. It can be a company, country, state or cultural community. If any of the questions do not apply to your selection, simply skip the question. It will not impact the analysis. You can take this multiple times for different groups.
With this increased awareness we can ask:
- How Fragile / Antifragile is the selected environment?
- What is the likelihood of a cultural and/or economic paradigm shift?
- If there is a potential shift, what actions reduce our risk and increase our chances of thriving?
We are assessing two factors for each context.
- The Fragile/Antifragile current state
- The movement towards a Paradigm Shift
The first question in each pair quantifies the current state of Fragile / Antifragile. The Fragile / Antifragile perspective comes from Nassim Taleb's book "
Antifragile".
“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it Antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”The second question for each context measures the direction and speed of this factor's change. Our current model measures the speed as a contribution to a Paradigm Shift. At the extremes, a paradigm shift in beliefs and behaviors can change the rules, expectations, and processes by which we live in a significant way.
Our brain doesn't want to see major changes. Ray Dalio in his article on "
Paradigm Shifts" and the first chapter of his book "
The Changing World Order" believes that we miss the shift because we want to believe that the current paradigm will go on forever. He states:
"Over my roughly 50 years of being a global macro investor, I have observed there to be relatively long periods (about 10 years) in which the markets and market relationships operate in a certain way (paradigms). There are always big unsustainable forces that drive the paradigm. They go on long enough for people to believe that they will never end even though they obviously must end. In paradigm shifts, most people get caught overextended doing something overly popular and get really hurt...(they) fail to anticipate the paradigm shift."It is about awareness, insight and creating a personal Antifragile state. The most valuable contribution to your thoughtful responses and insights is to bring to your awareness the potential of a major change in your world. Once you are open to all possibilities, you can then create tremendous opportunity for yourself.
The results. You will be sent your own results immediately, and when we have a sufficient sample size of assessments, we will send the aggregated results to everyone who contributed.
Your biases? We all have biases and I invite you to set them aside as you look at each factor through a fresh set of eyes.
Enjoy!