Learned personal antifragility - if you've got it, share it

Many people you know are struggling with the rate of change coming at them through this latest series of Context Shocks (triggered by COVID-19). Some look at every experience as a learning experience - something to benefit from. Others see things to fear.

In the same way as organisations must become more responsive - more antifragile when shocks strike - so must we as individuals.

But how do we acquire the antifragile mindset if not blessed with it?
Consider the positions in positive psychology best-seller Mindset (by Carol Dweck). In Mindset we are introduced to the Fixed and Growth Mindsets.

The book offers ways to both recognise your Mindset and change it.

The Science of Wellbeing course offered online and free by Yale University is another route to changing your world-view to increase your happiness (and likely what you regard as success...).

But who reads these books and who completes these courses? I suspect open thinkers, those with a positive hunger for learning, seek these things out. There's a very positive feedback loop in play.

In discussing this with my buddy Rory Yates we wondered if one of the great advantages we had in this regard was that we were both early-in on the internet revolution.

The internet - and more specifically the measurement of web properties, offered us something that wasn't available before: really rapid feedback loops. You made a minor change - you got results in the form of clicks, visits, impressions, pretty much in real time. We had grown up playing computer games - and that, too, helped our understanding of trial and error at pace.

Importantly, for those of us fiddling around with this stuff as the internet took off, we could pretty much do no wrong. The growth of online audiences was exponential so the worst you could do was badly by comparison with others. Initially, hardly anyone cared what others did, they were wrapped up in how well they were doing. The point of this is we got positive feedback loops for almost every experiment we tried. Every learning experience was a good one!

That gave us the psychological armour to handle the tougher times ahead. But what we also learned was to approach things in a rapid, incremental, small, a/b testing, ultimately agile way. This involved giving decision-making control to those implementing and measuring - on the customer interactive edge.

This also led us to another significant understanding: When the consequence of getting things wrong is low (risk is low) experimentation should be high: The upside is considerably greater than the downside. Smart CEOs manage their businesses through this lens. See Unilever's sudden relaxation, allowing itself to become a more Responsive Organisation.

We learned this in the entrepreneurial spirit of start-ups, and MVPs, and multivariate testing.

If your experiences have been at all similar to mine and/or Rory's, you have a lot of advantages in preparing you to handle shocks with a personal antifragility - perhaps best summarised by the Growth Mindset.

It's up to us to use our positive outlooks to help others reframe the things they fear as the things they can learn from. And if we can get them to read a book and do the excercises of the Yale course, too - they'll need us less next time around.