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Attributes relevant to antifragile organizations

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Organizations operate in a socio-economic 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, ambiguity), and the
Covid-pandemic. The challenge for organizations is to become resilient or even antifragile to survive (unexpected) external
stressors.
Antifragility refers to a class of systems that do not deteriorate (fragile) or withstand (robust) stressors, but actually improve as
a result of stressors. Our objective is to find attributes that are relevant for an organization to be(come) antifragile. The list of
attributes found is based on an extensive survey of available literature, and is validated with domain experts and leaders of
various organizations. We dub the list of attributes found the Extended Antifragile Attribute List (EAAL).
Considering the current economic and social impact on organizations and people of the Covid-pandemic, the EAAL is relevant
as well timely. The EAAL turns out to be extensive and holistic. We consider the EAAL to be a stepping stone in setting the scene
of the domain of antifragility. We suspect that the EAAL might also be applied to generic system design including technology infrastructure and software systems. This exploration is part of future research.


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