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Organizations operate in a socioeconomic context, and alignment with this context is key for business success. The rate of change and impact of these changes on the operating model of the organization appears to be increasing. Major trends are the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, the "VUCA" aspects (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, am...
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The commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) component based ecosystem provides an attractive system design paradigm due to the drastic reduction in development time and cost compared to custom solutions. However, it brings in a growing concern of trustworthiness arising from the possibility of embedded malicious logic, or hardware Trojans in COTS component...
Citations
... Nonetheless, some organizations see uncertainty as a challenge that allows them to experiment with innovative methods of providing the results they are accountable for, such as efficient public services (Butkus et al., 2023). Such tactics may change perceptions of uncertainty, leading to it being seen as an asset rather than a burden and allowing organizations to reap benefits from volatile situations (Botjes et al., 2021). Taleb (2012), the founder of the concept of antifragility, emphasized the importance of randomness, stating that relying solely on previous information frequently causes organizations to fail to foresee significant adversities. ...
... It is observed that antifragile organizations perform positively when confronted with disorders, perturbations, stressors, volatility, randomness, and other forms of environmental variability (Aven, 2015;Eugen & Petru, 2018;de Bruijn et al., 2020). This occurs due to their ability to extract value from volatility, which, first and foremost, should be perceived as a source of valuable information for foresight (Botjes et al., 2021;Bridge, 2021;Cañizares et al., 2021;Derbyshire & Wright, 2014;Equihua et al., 2020;Guang et al., 2014;Markey-Towler, 2018;Ruiz-Martin et al., 2018). Interestingly, Fiorini (2019) explained the elevation of antifragility through evolution, where randomness and chaos play an essential role. ...
This paper investigates whether and in what way digital governance can contribute to the development of antifragility in public sector organizations. In this study, antifragility is realized as a set of core capabilities that equips organizations with the knowledge and capacity to deal with and capitalize on uncertainty. A survey was conducted through structured interviews with the top managers of 400 organizations to investigate this phenomenon. The subsequent study then employed nonparametric structural equation modeling, indicating the following goodness-of-fit parameters: CMIN/DF – 2.476, TLI – 0.925, CFI – 0.933, and RMSEA – 0.043. The results of this study are significant and reveal that the facilitation of digital governance can be considered an enabler of antifragility development within organizations operating in the public sector. However, the overall effect is not so straightforward. The study's findings lead to a significant outcome, indicating that cybersecurity works as a mediator in the relationship between intangible digital governance components that covary with each other, i.e., leadership, digital services, and capacity building, as well as digital infrastructure and organizational antifragility. These findings highlight the need to align digital governance with strategy and skill development. Furthermore, they emphasize the potential of technological innovation to enhance an organization’s level of antifragile capability when strategically invested.
... A diversity of researchers define that fragility, robustness and antifragility are properties of a system (Jaaron & Backhouse, 2014;Hole, 2016;Kastner, 2017;O'Reilly, 2019;Botjes et al., 2021). Self-organisation, ownership, diversity, shared mental models and a shared vision are some of the properties that an antifragile system should posses. ...
... Self-organisation, ownership, diversity, shared mental models and a shared vision are some of the properties that an antifragile system should posses. Botjes et al. (2021) conducted extensive research to define antifragility and the application of antifragility on organisation design. Botjes et al. used multiple sources (table 2.1) to define a list of attributes. ...
... The Extended Antifragile Attribute List (EAAL) is recent. Botjes et al. (2021, p. 5) Searching for new literature makes sure that Botjes et al. (2021) is recent and is not rebutted. Using the time frame of June 2019 until April 2022 makes sure that only new literature is found. ...
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said that one constant since the beginning of time is change. Nothing in life is permanent, nor can it be, because the very nature of existence is change. The Dutch public sector deals with many changes in its environment. Changes follow one another at lightning speed. The Dutch public sector uses Enterprise Architecture to accompany change. In recent years, the environment placed new and increasingly compelling demands on the functioning of public organisations. A responsive and adaptive government is needed to deal with this. We must create public organisations that can cope with or even seize opportunities in a dynamic, complex, unpredictable environment. The Dutch public sector proposed to use antifragile to deal with disruptive change. However, how can the Dutch public sector achieve antifragility with the support of Enterprise Architecture? Hence, the research question of this thesis is: ’What are the success factors of Enterprise Architecture and antifragile that positively influence the contribution of Enterprise Architecture in achieving antifragility in the Dutch public sector?’ We can conclude that there are fourteen potential success factors. We used triangulation to determine these success factors. We performed literature research and used semi-structured interviews with four CxOs of the Dutch public sector for validation and data collection. An expert group of ten Dutch public sector enterprise architects validated the results.
... To deal with this unpredictability, organisations aim to become resilient by for example implementing the agile way-of-working and/ or the adoption of a decentralised organisation design [14,15]. ...
... Resilience is the behaviour of the value of a system over time in response to a stressor event (f (time) = value) [15,31]. Antifragility is the behaviour of the value of a system in response to stress (f (stress) = value) [15,36]. ...
... Resilience is the behaviour of the value of a system over time in response to a stressor event (f (time) = value) [15,31]. Antifragility is the behaviour of the value of a system in response to stress (f (stress) = value) [15,36]. Resilient behaviour maximized/ optimized leads to a system with antifragile behaviour. ...
The current VUCA worlds demands from organisations to be resilient and sometimes even antifragile. The domain focusing on staying relevant is that of risk management. Information security is a sub-domain of risk management where the threats and response to the threats are very well documented. Within the sub-domain of information security there is an ever going rat-race between the people that want to exploit the threat and the people reacting to the thread by for example mitigating the thread. In this research we want to look into the role of the learning organisation in the resilient behaviour of the organisation. Why the learning organ-isation? Since there are scholars that argue that human resilience is the key to organisational resilience.
There is a widespread consensus that organizations are currently navigating an unprecedented era characterized by volatility, uncertainty, and complexity, which is anticipated to persist into the next decade. Addressing the disruptions stemming from such infrequent yet impactful events may necessitate the adoption of novel mental frameworks and management approaches. Some pioneering organizational scientists have proposed methods for
cultivating the capacities to operate effectively amidst such uncertainty, introducing the concept of antifragility. Antifragility entails organizations leveraging disruptions as opportunities for rejuvenation and advancement, deriving benefits from them. In this piece, we share some preliminary evidence on how organizations can cultivate the capabilities required to transcend mere resilience or robustness—two conventional approaches to
managing disruptions—to not only recover but also thrive and gain from disruptions. Furthermore, we provide some cautionary ideas regarding potential pitfalls associated with antifragility.
Purpose
The dynamic of the business environment has escalated the competition and uncertainty, which is challenging business survivability, particularly for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). SMEs attract researchers due to their unique characteristics that have limited resources but great flexibility and adaptability. Furthermore, Collaborative Networks (CNs) have been proposed by business scholars as a critical strategy to gain resilience and antifragility. However, the concept of antifragility and its relation with CNs is still vague in the SME sector. Therefore, this study aims to develop a complete understanding regarding: (1) the emerging knowledge that is critical in explaining antifragility in the business sector based on co-citation and thematic analysis; (2) the relation between resilience and antifragility in emerging business research; (3) the relation between CNs and antifragility in emerging business research and (4) a framework of antifragility in the SME context.
Design/methodology/approach
Bibliographic Analysis and Systematic Literature Review are performed to reach the research objectives. We use co-citation and thematic analysis to identify the map of emerging knowledge and the related concepts, which are the fundamentals of antifragility. Furthermore, we use a systematic literature review to determine the relation of antifragility, resilience and CNs in the SME context.
Findings
Antifragility is a higher level of survivability compared to resilience. Antifragile SMEs could gain an advantage from the uncertain business environment. However, both in resilience and antifragility, SMEs should become active learners. Furthermore, CNs are proposed as the gateway for SMEs to manage their resource limitations. The conceptual framework of Antifragile SMEs is presented as the theoretical contribution of this manuscript.
Originality/value
This article explains the knowledge structure of antifragility in the business sector, particularly among SMEs. Based on bibliometric data, we describe critical characteristics or mental states entrepreneurs should have when facing uncertainty. Furthermore, we propose a conceptual framework for antifragile SMEs where active learning and positive psychology are the pillars, and CNs are critical ingredients of antifragility in SMEs.
