Trust may be vulnerable but must not be weak. Trust must be AntiFragile.

Leaders know how to advance trust in adversity, deepen trust from mistakes, and increasingly grow the capacity and capability of trust in the teams they lead. When trust is AntiFragile it is robust, resilient, and flexible.

In his wildly enlightening book Antifragile statistician and investor Nassim Nicholas Taleb pivots the idea that the opposite of fragile is robust. Taleb suggest that antifragile is a concept that better describes what thriving in an uncertain and volatile systems looks like. It’s quite the read (and reread) but well worth it to understand the distinction.

Taleb’s three big ideas are:

  1. Fragile items break under stress, antifragile items get better from it.
  2. In order for a system to be antifragile, most of its parts must be fragile.
  3. Antifragile systems work because they build extra capacity when put under stress.

For trust to be antifragile it must therefore be able to:

  • Acknowledge there will be stress and choose to grow from it. Adversity and advancement.
  • Realise the system is fragile, trust working in a fragile system and we can learn from mistakes and failures. Lessons and learning.
  • Utilise any and all experiences to make trust longer, deeper and better. Capability and capacity.

The two pillars of antifragile trust are self and others. In the model below the baseline is all about self. The way you approach creating, extending, restoring and protecting trust will set a pattern of relationships for your future. The three “stages of self” are awareness, reflection, and growth. When you have an understanding of what’s going on in you and how you are managing yourself you are positioned to take full responsibility for the part you play on leading trusted relationships. The topline of trust is about others. What happens IN you as a leader is always outworked FOR others. This is about seeing your intention, creating engagement between team members and leveraging the synergy that is produced

When trust is antifragile you are positioned well to lead from a healthy place, and your team experiences you and the environment they lead-in, creates the strongest opportunity for your mission to be accomplished. The key point of trust being antifragile is it positions leaders and teams to accomplish together in real, volatile, robust, changing environments, and at the same time, deepening the engagement through trust to handle the tough stuff.

 

Trust AntiFragile – MODEL

Trust AntiFragile - MODEL

 

Making Trust AntiFragile requires three disciplined shifts in your leadership and your thinking:

  • Seeing adversity as advancement and leaning into the challenging issues and relationships.
  • Learning the lessons from the adversity. In every circumstance lies opportunity.
  • Making the creation of capability and capacity your priority. Every time we improve trust we build depth.

When you see the volatility and uncertainty of leadership as opportunities to make trust antifragile you take on three important and practical responsibilities. These are:

  1. Adversity and lessons require you to have fierce conversations. Speak loving truth.
  2. Adversity and capability require you to have focused implementation. Do things differently.
  3. Lessons and capacity require you to have consistent transformation. Always be changing.

To implement a trust like this do the following five things:

  1. Discover your pathology of trust. DO you trust easily or with some reservation?
  2. Assess where that pattern of pathology has helped or hindered your leadership.
  3. Accept if there is anything you must take responsibility for to make trust right. Make it right.
  4. Learn and embed these steps in your team. Take time to do them well without doing them perfectly.
  5. Use the model and a “how to” – when things go off track come back to where they went off track and start again.

I dream of a day where the reality of life and leadership can be mature and gracious enough to realise trust will be tested deeply and challenged greatly. It’s in that testing that we all have the opportunity to not just to make it through but make trust even stronger, even more human and even more robust.

Trust may be vulnerable but must not be weak. Trust must be AntiFragile.

#FORLEADERS
This is for leaders. I am for leaders.