antifragility

Thermodynamics formalised an inconvenient property of reality. Energy cannot simply appear, and transformations cannot convert all available energy indefinitely into useful work without losses and degradation. Corporate planning appears to have taken the opposite approach.

A bridge can survive an enormous load and still become dangerously unstable under forces that appear almost trivial. The apparent contradiction disappears once engineering stops treating structures as static objects.

Monday Myth: Order creates efficiency. Silos make the organisation look orderly by placing similar people together. The work experiences that order as queues, handovers and distance.

We made the machine three times faster. The factory still ships forty units an hour. Systems thinking starts where local productivity stops looking like system performance. And AI may be about to make that distinction impossible to ignore.

Physics has spent several centuries developing increasingly sophisticated explanations for the behaviour of the universe. Yet one important physical environment remains surprisingly under-researched. The corporation.

Engineering begins with an acceptance that reality imposes conditions the designer does not control.