Lexicon

Antifragile

n.—the thing that gets stronger from the break.

Nassim Taleb's famously coined word fills a real gap in the language: we had words for fragile (breaks under stress) and for robust or resilient (survives stress unchanged), but nothing for the third category—i.e. things that get better because of the stress, not despite it.

I find this more useful as a design principle than as a personality trait. The question worth asking about any system—a team, a piece of software, an organization—is not "how do we protect this from disorder" but "does this get better or worse when disorder hits it, and can we change that." Most enterprise systems are built fragile and protected by process, which works until the protection fails or eventually freezes it.

A sandbox—a protected space to build and break things without the failure spreading to the rest of the system—sounds at first like the opposite of antifragility. It isn't. It is sometimes even the condition for it. You can't get stronger from disorder you're not allowed to experience. The teams I've seen genuinely benefit from chaos were the ones given enough isolation to fail safely.