Giovanni Puliti
Transcript
Thank you, hello, for being here. I think we can start. The microphone is too high. Okay. Welcome, my name is Giovanni. I am coming from Italy, maybe you noticed by my accent. I'm talking here, I'm here for talking about anti-fragility. I don't know if some one of you have written or know the works of Nicholas Taleb. Do you know that? The books, The Anti-Fragile or The Black Swan. No? Yeah? Okay.
The original title was How to create an anti-fragile organization in seven steps because one year ago in a conference in Italy, the Italian Agile Day, I make interesting, they told me, I've been told that was an interesting talk, but at the end someone told me, asked me, okay, this is very interesting, but and now what I have, what we have to do for creating, for introducing this concept in our company. So I start studying and working and creating something, a workshop or some kind of studies for, let's imagine how to introduce this concept in our organization, our teams, in our factory. This is, I would like to... Share with you some ideas, some tips, some issues. But starting from the concept, from the basic concept, what is fragile, what is robust, and what is antifragile. First of all, I don't know if you... You know? Yeah? No? It's a very famous TV series. I was completely trapped by this one month ago. I didn't know before and I started all my times watching the series in a month.
12 for 5 seasons. And in that history, in that movie, the protagonist starts to be a cooker for meth for meth, for drugs, and starting to using his skills in chemistry for creating drugs. So at the end of the TV, of the series, everybody wants to, okay, I want to be a cook too, I want to start to create my drugs. So let's cook, let's start. And from what? From buying that one. Caravan or a sport vehicle in American they call it and starting from buying something like that but when you start when you buy this you have to sell for example from the from from the shop until your house or until your caravan and this is maybe something it's clear this is fragile so you pack it you put inside a box and place on the box a label. Label like this or something like that. Okay, the first question is why? put this kind of label on the box. The box is fragile. Handle with care, please. Of course, we are creating a math label, but everybody don't know why we are sending this kind of things, but why we are placing this label on the box?
Two?
One.
One what?
Four lips.
Yes, what what?
Okay, to take care. So we want to protect and inform the others to change the behavior in how they treat this box. Handle it with care, because we want to inform the others, please change your way of you manage this box. Correct? And going on, we have to sell very strong things, from the glass things to the iron things, something like that. Or something like that, I don't know what is this. Or for example, very very strong piece of iron, cube of iron. Okay, we have to send this. We put in the box. And we have to wrote something in that box, in the cover. What do you have to... What do you wrote in the box? Which is the title of the label?
Have the stuff. Okay. The first one was fragile, please hand with care because we have to inform, please. Change your habits.
Please don't care, it's the opposite. Okay, because in our mind we are used to think about fragile things, things that could be hurt or broken under stress. The opposite is robust. But if you label with handle with care, what is the opposite of label with handle with care?
mishandle, stress it, shake it hardly. But if you shake something like that, or beat it, he doesn't receive any improvement. But in that case, we want to give the improvement, protect this object. For damaging. So robust maybe is not really the opposite of fragile because if you shake it and beat it, it doesn't receive any improvement. It remains the same. So maybe robust is not the opposite of fragile.
Fragile is something that will be broken, is not resistant.
And what is the contrary of a fragile? Maybe robust, oh, there is a house, a good house here.
Robust is something that is strong, that you resist in time.
Robust is robust by design. But robust is not enough, maybe. Maybe robust is not... It cannot withstand for a certain amount of time, maybe.
Rob is not forever.
Robust is robust the day on the design moment. For example, this is something that we think, okay, this is robust, well designed, well built, can stand in the middle of a grass, of a green. But this is a picture was taken in the USA where birds has building
nest over this pole and the poles were damaged and stopped working. So life is changing. When we design something strong, it's designed in the first day, but who knows what will happen in the future. The future could be
unpredictable.
Resistance is not just robust versus random events. If something will happen totally unpredictable, to be robust is not enough. So we need something more, another kind of robustness, another kind of to resist the events that are not predictable.
Okay, another improvement in this concept could be resilience. It's a very famous word nowadays, to be resilient. What does it mean to be resilient? Maybe overcome stress, maybe resist and surpass and going on.
Is a characteristic of people. of themes or something like that to overcome the difficulties. This is the definition maybe on Wikipedia. It's the capacity of an ecosystem or something to respond to a perturbation and disturbance by resisting damage and recovering quickly. This is a general definition of resilience. What about organization? What about a team? So I look for that. And the organizational resilience is the ability to anticipate, prepare for, respond and adapt to incremental change, to survive and prosper. So a resilient organization is something that overcome, let the stress pass and stay there again and again. Okay, but this is not in the... Sorry, sorry. In the idea of Taleb, maybe resilience is not enough, we want something that will receive some improvement, some good growing from the stress.
And maybe resilience is not enough, we want something completely different, a new concept, a new idea, a new world. So Taleb created this word that means anti-fragile, the opposite of fragile, is something that loves stress, loves uncertainty, randomness, and growth with this kind of stress. this kind of unpredictable events. Like for example the biker going down the hill and if there is something completely unpredictable, he creates a new kind of tricks and movements and maybe he could faster down the hill. For example, virus.
Are antifragile because they receive stress from the environment, from the environment. Maybe someone, a cell will be dead, will be killed, but the other, the system virus will increase and create another kind of virus, combining the DNA, it creates another kind of life on the heart. This is a very famous, typical dish from my town, Florence. The Florentine stack that you receive gets better if you beat it. It's a kind of anti-fragility. So the three things, the three concepts, fragile, strong and anti-fragile, are three different concepts. The fragile wants tranquility, stable, not unpredictable events. The anti-fragile grows from disorder, grows, getting better, the robust doesn't care, because robust is robust for this moment, for example, for supporting a person, but not a car or an elephant. So robust, I'm robust, I'm okay.
Do you have some examples in your life about this concept? For example, you're A team, an agile team, for example, for you, in your opinion, is a robust, a fragile, or an anti-fragile organization? A scrum team, for example. Is strong? Is fragile?
What do you think?
Okay, let's talk a little about this concept, about a scrum team.
It's interesting because we are used to think about being agile is to, for example, doing iteration, a retrospective and creating new ideas, new things and growing and creating new
way of solutions.
But in that book I received an interesting hint for considering agile things from other perspectives. Okay, the first fact that I want to share with you is the deprivation of the anti-fragility. Depriving the natural and complex systems of the randomness, for example using rules, using cages, using barriers, is a way for, we are used to think that, okay, I protect my team, I protect my guys, I protect the company using something like rules, barriers, firewalls and something like that, Matti. And from the anti-fragility perspective, this is a way of creating weakness, because we deprive the natural the natural capacity, ability of people, of organization to evolve and to protect and to create a new kind of life, for example, new kind of organization.
Will remove the stressors that will harm them. It's like an overprotective parents that create a ball around the child for protecting him. The child is not used to... They will not learn to evolve, to create, to learn, to live in the life.
So deprivation of the anti-fragility is like top-down rules, directives, estimation. We want to estimate because we are not used, we are not able to remove the fragility from our organization. So we have to predict. When you deliver this kind of software, how much does it cost?
Instead of thinking what is the real problem, why we are always late in the project. So please give me an estimation. Give me your plans because I want to plan everything in the future.
Another question is thinking about the bridge. And I ask you, which is the, in your opinion, the probability to cross this river? This cross, this bridge? In percentage? 10%, 20%, 19%? Okay, a cat. A cat. Which is the probability that a cat will cross this bridge?
100 person, a cat. Which is the probability that two cats will cross this bridge?
Two cats.
Maybe the same, which is the probability that a man can cross this bridge safely.
10 person, 2 men, a man with a horse, a man over an elephant, a car, and so on. So we are spending a lot of time trying to imagine, oh, which is the probability? Well, wait.
You have a problem. It's not a problem about the probability of crossing this bridge. The problem is this bridge is broken. So don't measure the probability, just measure the fragility that you have. This is more important. We spend a lot of time, a lot of money in trying to imagine which is the probability to deliver on time. For example, using mixed teams, body rental, people from India, from China, from USA. Okay, which is the probability to deliver on time? You have a fragile organization. Maybe it's better to think about that, that spend time in computing the probability. This is how we are used to make the... This bridge is broken. So don't measure the probability, just measure the fragility that you have. This is more important. We spend a lot of time, a lot of money, trying to imagine which is the probability to deliver on time. For example, using mixed teams, body rental, people from India, from China, from USA. Okay, which is the probability to deliver on time? You have a fragile organization, maybe it's better to think about that, that spend time in computing the probability. This is how we are used to make the...
The risk management. And the risk management maybe sometimes is fragile, is weak. This is the Lucretius problem that is mentioned on the book. And they say the fool believes that the tallest mountain in the world will be equal to the tallest that one we observed. So it's the same way that we compute the risk, the major risk, the probability of something that will happen is computed on the worst case scenario, multiplied by factor x or y or something. And this is the probability that we have a crash, system crash or something like that. The worst case scenario that's happened in the past. But we don't know if something bigger and more worse could happen tomorrow.
So risk management sometimes is just thinking about the past, just collecting data.
This doesn't give you any chance to make forecasts in the future. It's just collecting data, just observing what has happened in the past. The third fact that I want to share with you is something about systemic organization of people, of animals, of nature. For example, if I want to open a restaurant in a Chinese part of the city, maybe I can do that with some chance of having some success, because in that part of the city there's a lot of Chinese restaurants. Other people, other restaurants have tried to open a Chinese restaurant over there. So someone has failed, someone has success. For example, in that part, everybody knows that it's not so safe to open an Italian restaurant, for example. So the ecosystem of the restaurants in that part of the city is stable because people try to make some experimentation, someone fails, some others win, and the ecosystem of all the Chinese entrepreneurs has robust or maybe anti-fragile. Because it's an evolving situation, not just the one. If I look at me, at my situation, if I look at this problem from the perspective of one restaurant, maybe this is very fragile because one restaurant could be a success or could be a failure, but the ecosystem is more robust, maybe anti-fragile. So it's a new type of anti-fragility, a fragility that is based on the fragility of an individual.
So thanks to the evolution, to the life, the benefit goes to anything that is up, receiving failures and information from the other part, from the singular, from single person, single company, single team, single restaurant.
And this, I think that you can use, you can name it as an adaptive systemic redundancy. Do you remember the picture that I showed you some slides ago about the cluster? There is some firewalls placed in the cluster. Okay, clustering is a way that we think we give us some kind of robustness. But if you think having a cluster is always using the same situation, I have one server, one firewall, one router, and I put another and another and another, hoping that three, four, or five clusters of that could be
enough for me, for example, for managing a bad situation. But it's just always the same. One cluster, one router, two routers, three routers. Or for example, if you want to work in parallel, people that are doing one thing, the other do the same, and the same, the same. More anti-fragile situation is adaptive redundancy. So changing the way you manage the situation.
other router, for example, with some kind of intelligent inside, some deep learning machine, something like that, they change the way, for example, transmit packets over the wire, something like that. Something that evolves the policies. And this is what do the nature, for example, bees or all kind of social insects.
So wrapping up about the antifragile, these are some tips that we can collect from the works of the talk. Don't put yourself in a cage. Cages are protective, are protection for you, but remove from you all the robustness, all the... anti-corporate, I don't know if in English. Experiment, fail, inspect and adapt. Okay, this is agile. Don't be scared about failures, this is agile too. Avoid top-down, okay.
Avoid the I know to do. Experiment.
And one is my favorite. Don't use always the same approach situation. So if you want to cluster, please, anytime, try another way, another solution, another strategies. So implement the adaptive redundancy. It's a way for creating a redundancy, but not always in the same way. Change your habits. And this is most important for me, focus on the anti-fragility, not on risk. Stop, for example, exaggerating this, stop on thinking about estimation, stop on thinking about we are able to deliver on the time and think that you have, for example, a big problem in your company. For example, renting people from the other part of the world.
Okay, this is the first part. The first part, starting from these books, especially from that one, is a collection of ideas and talks on the internet. I created that one.
My workshop, my framework, that is something that I want to create, something to introduce, to inject anti-fragility in organization. Okay, but what is an organization? Organization may be a company or a team or a family, I don't know, a family not, but a company is something that is based on six pillars. For example, the organizational model, the leadership model, the motivation, the purpose of the company, why we are here, why we are doing this business. And the learning schema and the ecosystem. So I imagine, okay, if I want to introduce some kind of anti-fragility, and these are six, maybe there are all those pillars, but these are the six most important, I think, pillars
from which a company is built. How can I introduce, for example, anti-fragility in the organizational model or in the motivation or in the leadership? And for example, I introduce something like that.
Organizational model. So we know that a good way for organizing team is using teams. Do you know the Spotify model? Eric Niemeyer today has shown you a lot of things from Spotify. In the Spotify model there's a theme, there's a agenda, there's other kind of creating dynamics inside the company.
We are used to... We have been told that, for example, do you know the Tuckman model? The evolving cycle, for example, about a team. In the Tuckman model he said that a team evolved from a forming phase, in a storming phase, norming phase and performing phase. So following the concept in the Tuckman model, in Tuckman cycle, we are used to think that, for example, turning over people from things is a bad thing because we restart from scratch in forming and storming and so on. Okay, so we are used to think please stay on stable things, on stable situation because it's better. Okay, that's true, but what if? We try to create together some strongness, some improvement, some growing from the turnover. For example, what is the rules that we can put, or rules or conventions or agreement that we can put in organization, for example, for welcoming the turnover? For example, every time that someone is moved to a place, welcoming, explaining and so on. And which is the witness that we receive when someone else is arriving the team. So maybe we'll start from scratch or maybe if you want to be anti-fragile, we can improve and create a new kind of system. Another situation is, for example, someone told us that in a company it's better to have everybody, every team is working on Agile. For example, uses Scrum or Common or what else. And people are sometimes scared because there is an Agile team and a Waterfall or Gantt-oriented team. Okay, we want you to do Agile as we do. Because otherwise we cannot work in an agile company. And what if, as an agile team, we try to open to diversity? For example, try to understand what is the way of thinking and working of the waterfall team, trying to mix in something and create a new kind of agile thing. So this is a way of destroying barriers and walls, accepting the diversity.
So people turn over. For example, in some companies we introduce a rule, an agreement for voting the turnover of the people between teams. So we accept the turning over, but for example, sharing with management, with the fact management, our way, for example, voting or discussing all together, because why you, manager, need to move this guy from one team A to the team B? And sharing this idea and creating a new kind of organization.
Motivational model. Why people should do this and that? What is the role? What is the reason?
The motivational model, for example, to be anti-fragile could be different. We are, Andy Knieber today was talking about sharing the reasons, sharing the goals. And another way could be, for example, creating a completely different way of motivating. For example, using different kind of leadership. Nibiru told you about the distributed leadership. We can use other kinds of leadership, for example, situational leadership or something like that, accepting the diversity from the other teams, from the other parts. Learning model. Do you know there is a very important book from 19 years?
The fifth discipline is the title of the book. I don't know if you know that book. It's a learning, how to create an organization that learns. Okay, a learning organization maybe is the most important thing to create an anti-fragile company or team. Creating and preparing all the things that let us to learn something. And so on.
The title of my workshop is how to create an anti-fragile organization in seven steps. So these are six steps. And the seventh, what is the seventh? The seventh is the holistic approach. So considering all these things in the same moment. But holistic approach in the opposite way as we are used to consider. Because in our culture holistic approach is like in Taichi Ono in lean consideration, see the whole, consider everything in your company, consider everything. But if you consider for example try to introduce something in your learning schema and try to introduce some new tips in leadership, people will always ask me, okay if I want to introduce something new in the learning schema I have to know what is the new, for example, leadership model, because these things are strictly connected, the leadership model and the motivation and purpose. All these things are connected. So if I make some change over there, I have to know what is the learning scheme or the ecosystem and so on. That's true, that's real, this is the holistic approach.
Anytime that you have a strong connection between these bubbles, these pillars, you are creating something that is maybe more or holistic, might maybe also a little bit more fragile, because if there is something that doesn't work over there, we have some implication or waterfall consequence in the other parts. So, in my perspective, the idea is
Please have an holistic approach, see the wall, but be scared by the holistic approach. Try to create new things in this area that could be survived, will be survived between stress or unpredictable events or something completely destroying. Maybe you have a more anti-fragile approach.
Any strong connection between these areas is fragilizing your company.