Yesterday we hosted a talk at the Global Scrum Master Summit about antifragility for Scrum Masters (or any agilists, really!), and what Scrum Masters can learn and gain from antifragilty.
We first guided participants through the concept of antifragility, starting with a story about chaikhanas (Afghan tea houses and how they’re antifragile), then we looked at an example from sport before we moved onto a conceptual model developed by Luca Dellanna.
After that we considered why antifragility might be important:
It could be that:
- you’re working in an agile team in a bureaucratic organisation
- you’re agile but building antifragile products
- the company has only short term profits in mind
- you’re overoptimized (too efficient and thus fragile)
We then went into depth about how to increase antifragility. There were five key areas which we looked at together:
- fractilizing (decomposing a system into constitutient parts, each able to respond to the slightest stressors immediately)
- removing buffers (surfacing problems to be removed, eliminating waste so that improving the system is actually possible)
- training (self explanatory – getting out of the comfort zone, regular reversible errors)
- increasing redundency (ensuring that the system can respond to large shocks)
- decreasing correlation (ensuring that any harm remains sparse and not focussed in one particular area that could spread / bring down the system)
We then brainstormed each of these five areas and welcomed suggestions from participants. The result was a very hearty and constructive discussion and we came up with some excellent ideas, all captured in this board here:
