Fragile means easily damaged or broken. Like our world today. Why should this be so? Our world, physically at least, looks pretty sturdy and robust. The problem here is how we define our “world”. Our world in reality consists of a huge number of semi-autonomous complex systems that are deeply interconnected and interdependent – and inherently fragile. Is our world truly survivable?
Emergence occurs where an entity is observed to have properties and behavior that its parts do not have on their own and that emerge only after the parts interact and adapt. The world has recently been undergoing a huge restructuring that creates new groupings, new interactions, and new behaviors. Emerging from this process will almost certainly be a business environment quite unlike anything we have ever experienced. It cannot be predicted.
Fragility is a measure of how much stress it takes to break or greatly damage something. A system may be highly stress-resistant when it encounters some kinds of stress but easily broken by other kinds of stress. Businesses as systems have a latent fragility that can lead to failure during times of great stress – like today.
So much seems to be written today about how bad things are and how they are going to get much worse. Surely we’re all (businesses) gonna die. Here is a contrary view. There are actually huge opportunities out there in doom-and-gloom-ville. Seeing these and taking advantage of them, however, requires a very special kind of business and leadership.
