The author of The Black Swan appears to have something equally powerful, and related, in his concept of “antifragility.” What is fragile, Taleb writes, succumbs to shocks. What is robust resists shocks. What is antifragile learns from shocks.

Organizations, especially large ones, crave order and predictability and exert their considerable powers to ensure stability. But by suppressing the impact of small shocks they make themselves vulnerable to large shocks, which are inevitable. Their fragility is self-inflicted. By contrast, entities allowed or designed to feed on disorder prosper in an increasingly disorderly world. Often they have bottom-up features that live close to the small shocks and adapt locally and quickly. Thus city governments are far more antifragile than national governments except highly distributed ones like Switzerland

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