The Pandemic Isn’t a Black Swan but a Portent of a More Fragile Global System
“The great danger has always been too much connectivity.”
Proliferating global networks, both physical and virtual, inevitably incorporate more fat-tail risks into a more interdependent and “fragile” system: not only risks such as pathogens but also computer viruses, or the hacking of information networks, or reckless budgetary management by financial institutions or state governments, or spectacular acts of terror.
Any negative event along these lines can create a rolling, widening collapse—a true black swan—in the same way that the failure of a single transformer can collapse an electricity grid.
In 2022, we know from our own experience that global supply chains are fragile.
Source: the picture I found on the internet
The challenge now is how we design antifragile future-proof supply chains.
Before we start designing, we need to understand what antifragility means.
"Antifragility is more than resilience or robustness.
The resilient, the resistant resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.
The antifragile is positively disposed to randomness and uncertainty, and this includes, crucially, a preference for a certain kind of error.
Antifragility has the unique property of enabling us to deal with the unknown, to tackle something-and to tackle it successfully-without understanding it." (Source: Book Antifragility, p. 21/22)
