The concept of anti-fragility seems to be often confused with the concept of robustness (something Taleb pointed out specifically[1]). Of the practices you recommend here, I would have liked to see more discussion on why you think these particular values/practices result in a better culture during the stress of high-growth periods. If the culture is merely preserved, those would be robust values.
I can't speak to your specific experience at Wave, but it seems like the value of feedback for everything could plausibly be antifragile - the rate and value of feedback seems likely to increase during periods of greater stress. However, others could actually be fragile - for example, the fire-fast principle applied during high-stress periods may result in an overabundance of "volatile" over "stable" performers, to borrow lingo I first learned from Matt Blodgett[2], reducing the orgs ability to consolidate gains and eliminate technical debt.
"Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2012). Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Random House. p. 430.
https://www.mattblodgett.com/2024/11/are-you-stable-or-volatile.html
How to prevent infighting, mitigate status races, and keep your people focused. Cross-posted from my Substack.
Organizational culture changes rapidly at scale. When you add new people to an org, they’ll bring in their own priors about how to operate, how to communicate, and what sort of behavior is looked-up to. Despite rapid changes, in this post I explain how you can implement anti-fragile cultural principles—principles that help your team fix their own problems, often arising from growth and scale, and help the org continue to do what made it successful in the first place.
This is based partially on my experience at Wave, which grew to 2000+ people, but also tons of other reading (top recommendations: Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister, Swarmwise by Rick Falkvinge, High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil, The Secret of Our Success by Henrich, Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, as well as Brian Chesky’s essay “Don’t Fuck Up The Culture”). Thanks also to my friends and ex-colleagues who have read and given suggestions on drafts.
It’s quite common that orgs fail (or lose their magic) at scale. I think many such orgs started in a good place leading to early success leading to scale, but as they grew they hit cultural “mines” which blew up the org or made it fail to scale well.
Cohesive cultures are more resilient and can withstand shocks… Every single founder I know who has compromised on culture when hiring has regretted it due to the disruptions it has caused their company: having to fire bad actors, creating a crappy work environment, good people quitting, trust eroding between coworkers, product moving in the wrong direction, misaligned incentives emerging in the organization, etc.
– Elad Gil, High Growth Handbook
There’s a dense minefield of ways your culture can get into a bad equilibrium that’s hard to get out of:
There are more cultural mines than these. Hitting even one mine can blow up your org if not carefully managed, and hitting a mine during a fast-growth stage can easily be a major slowdown or severely limit the org potential, even if you react perfectly.
Defining your culture explicitly and communicating your values can protect against cultural mines: either by helping to avoid specific mines, or by making it much easier to repair things when you do hit a mine.
Having a meaningful mission is critical to success. First, it’s critical to attracting like-minded people, who want to propagate the culture to achieve the same goal. Secondly, you can refer to it when reinforcing cultural points, as I’ll show below.
Some examples of questions that culture can help answer:
Writing down values is super useful when you’re trying to think about and plan for the culture you want, and whatever you write and share becomes citeable for moments where you need to teach an explicit lesson.
In the end, culture is too complicated to write down fully. It will be mostly picked up and converged on through words and acts every day—explicit and implicit prioritization, what’s shared and what’s hidden, word choice, and body language. Leaders’ words and actions play a huge role in defining the culture.
Here are a few common cultural values that are “in the water” of Silicon Valley tech companies. We usually don’t write them, or even really talk much explicitly about them:
If you’re in the same tech bubble I’m in, the above values seem like common knowledge—they’re not particularly distinct. They do avoid important mines, but we don’t really perceive them as mines because they’re so obvious (“of course the people are important!”). You don’t want or need to write this stuff down if people aren’t confused about it. But if your org is bringing on a lot of people who don’t have a lot of experience in similar orgs, maybe some of the above is worth being explicit about.
In this post I’m highlighting some less-obvious values that I feel can be super helpful for fast growth orgs. I think we did this really well at Wave and so a lot of what I’ve written in this post is reflective of Wave’s culture, but I also have some different takes from what we settled on at Wave. (You can see the current iteration of Wave’s values on their website.)
Herb Kelleher [the longest-serving CEO of Southwest] once told someone, “I can teach you the secret to running this airline in thirty seconds. This is it: We are THE low-fare airline. Once you understand that fact, you can make any decision about this company’s future as well as I can.
“Here’s an example,” he said. “Tracy from marketing comes into your office. She says her surveys indicate that the passengers might enjoy a light entrée on the Houston to Las Vegas flight. All we offer is peanuts, and she thinks a nice chicken Caesar salad would be popular. What do you say?”
The person stammered for a moment, so Kelleher responded: “You say, ‘Tracy, will adding that chicken Caesar salad make us THE low-fare airline from Houston to Las Vegas? Because if it doesn’t help us become the unchallenged low-fare airline, we’re not serving any damn chicken salad.’”
– Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, who cite James Carville and Paul Begala.
In a mission first culture, every decision boils down to mission; every hiring and firing; every internal metric and every external communication.
We’re all here to achieve a specific mission, and efforts not aimed at the mission are unwelcome.
Maybe someone is not performing. Maybe they’re performing well but are still causing a distraction or making it harder for everyone else to perform. “If there’s any doubt there’s no doubt.”
Every decision you take should eventually generate some information about whether that decision was right or wrong; the value is to seek out and make use of such information.
The goal here is omnidirectional trust: the team trusts each other and boss/leads, and the company trusts individuals to make decisions, and individuals trust that the company’s values and principles are fairly applied.
Anti-fragile because it reduces the impact of status races and the risk of burnout—first, visibly over-working leaders can trigger a status race; unchecked this can escalate into toxic workaholism, creating suppressed resentment and risking mass quitting. And second, even without status races, people don’t always know how to set a sustainable pace, and may be borrowing energy from their future selves. They take on too much and become an unstable pillar.
It’s great to start by writing everything you might care about down! But then aggressively cut it to what’s most likely to be new and/or helpful. New means the people don’t already know it; helpful means people know it but frequently need reminding. Because culture is transmitted mostly face-to-face, you don’t need to (or want to) write down everything that’s part of your culture. Your values doc needs to be short and sweet to be memorable. So, first think about the whole culture you’re aiming to promote, and then keep only the new and most-helpful items.
Feel free to take any/all of the above values wholesale, but realistically, your org’s culture needs to channel aspects of what makes it unique. That said, until anti-fragile values are as much a part of “default culture” as the Silicon Valley ones above, I think it can be very helpful to include aspects of them in your cultural design and values docs.
I’d also add that sometimes it’s enough to write a memo, e.g., Elon Musk’s “Acronyms seriously suck” was written to solve a specific cultural problem at a specific time. It’s still very useful as a reference even though it’s not part of an official values doc.
Go off and scale something great!