What if the future belonged to teams capable of transforming themselves together?
Why talk about antifragile leadership now?
The fragility of life is no longer taboo. It’s everywhere: in company corridors, in Monday morning meetings, in the tired faces of those who are still trying to do their best. Among young talent, anxiety is on the rise. Among leaders, the gauge is empty.
The figures confirm it: mental suffering is on the rise at all levels, even at the top.
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The EU-OSHA survey (OSH Pulse) found that 27% of workers reported “stress, anxiety or depression caused or aggravated by work”.
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Another European study shows that around 45.1% of employees aged 15-64 had at least one work-related factor affecting their mental well-being.
- In Switzerland, more than one in three managers say they are in survival mode due to excessive stress. For the working population as a whole, almost 23% feel constantly stressed at work.
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And yet, we continue to talk about performance, efficiency and “resilience”. As if these words were enough to pick up the pieces.
I see it in the teams I coach: many leaders, and especially many women, are not lacking in lucidity, but in breath.
They feel the fatigue creeping in, they see their teams running out of steam.
Instead of opening up the space for truth, they protect themselves. Not out of weakness, but out of wear and tear.
Even when the process demands it, they no longer have the energy to face the emotional charge of the collective.
This fatigue of courage is perhaps the true symptom of our times.
Because in our quest to be solid, we’ve forgotten to be alive.
A living system doesn’t protect itself from chaos: it adapts to it, it learns from it, it feeds off it.
This is where antifragility begins. In two words, it’s an invitation to transformation. It calls for less control and more cooperation. Less certainty, more conversation. This principle requires leaders, men and women alike, to learn to act together, rather than carrying everything alone, in silos.
My experience
This fatigue of courage, the avoidance of effort, is perhaps the real symptom of our times. And I’m not just talking about what I observe in others.
I’ve been there too, and it still happens to me. For a long time, I thought resilience was a goal in itself. Hold on, stay the course, whatever the cost, stay there, hold on tight.
Until the day I realized that this “holding on” was preventing me from taking the necessary leap. I didn’t learn antifragility from a book, I learned it by letting go.
That’s when something changed: I began to understand what Nassim Taleb calls growth through disorder. Not a posture of strength, but a development of the living.
As Brené Brown says, vulnerability isn’t the opposite of courage – it’s its condition. Julie Diamond adds another key: power doesn’t corrupt, it reveals when used appropriately.
These two ideas come together. They remind us that true leadership does not consist in holding the helm no matter what, but in knowing how to open up, listen, adjust – even mutate – without losing one’s axis.
For me, this is where antifragile leadership begins: in the encounter between curiosity and letting go, between conscious power and living cooperation.
And what sets this antifragile leadership apart?
Antifragile leadership is based on the conviction that living systems become stronger when they face up to pressure rather than running away from it.
This idea, developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, shows that fragility is not inevitable: it’s an opportunity for growth, if we are willing to adjust rather than defend ourselves.
Applied to leadership, this logic transforms the way power is exercised.
An antifragile leader reads weak signals, creates meaning out of uncertainty and turns tension into learning material.
- She understands that safety doesn’t come from control, but from relationship.
- It is based on cooperation, not mere coordination: acting together rather than operating side by side.
This posture requires a strong sense of self-awareness.
As Julie Diamond reminds us, power doesn’t corrupt: it reveals.
Being aware of your impact means choosing to use your influence to open up, not to protect.
And, for Brené Brown, vulnerability is not a flaw: it’s the gateway to courage.
Antifragile leadership is born precisely at this intersection between lucidity, courage and connection. Finally, it is rooted in meaning.
As Simon Sinek has shown: teams don’t follow objectives, they follow a shared intention.
Anti-fragile leaders nurture this intention through concrete gestures: transforming mistakes into learning, welcoming contradiction, maintaining the link when everything is moving.
Antifragility is not a state to be achieved, it’s a movement to be maintained. This skill is cultivated through conversations, adjustments, shared decisions and taking risks together. It is measured less by the stability of the system than by its ability to stay alive.
How to develop antifragile leadership?
There’s no other way to cultivate antifragility.
This ability is built through daily choices: how to listen, how to decide, how to react to the unexpected.
Three levers make it concrete: cooperation, learning and the regulation of meaning.
1. Cooperate, not just collaborate
Collaborate comes from the Latin laborare – “to labor with”.
It evokes working side by side, juxtaposing efforts.
We’re moving in the same direction, but each of us keeps our own boundaries, our own perimeter, our own agenda.
It’s efficient, but often sterile.
Cooperate, on the other hand, comes from operari – “to act together”.
Here, the prefix co- does not link individuals who add up their tasks, but unites people who build a common work (opus).
Cooperation implies reciprocal influence: I transform you as much as you transform me.
It requires trust, listening, and a certain letting go of control.
It’s this dynamic that makes a team antifragile.
It doesn’t just divide up the work, it circulates energy, ideas and responsibility.
In times of tension, shared energy becomes a resource: we support each other, refocus and reinvent together.
The leader’s role here is to hold the space so that this movement is possible – not to cut, but to connect; not to calm, but to channel.
Because to cooperate, in the noblest sense of the word, is to learn to act together without losing one’s integrity.
2. Transforming tension into learning
Antifragile systems grow in cycles: test, friction, adjustment.
Conflicts are tensions and make the system smarter, more intelligent and more efficient. We don’t avoid them!
Applied to management, this means setting up a rhythm of experimentation.
We try, we observe, we adjust. No “good” or “bad” results – just data to understand.
This is a rigorous process:
– ritualize debriefs after each initiative,
– formulate feedback as a hypothesis, not a verdict,
– celebrate what has been learned, not just what has succeeded.
Here’s an emotional discipline: staying curious, even when it stings. It’s at times like these that the collective learns to rise above itself.
3. Regulate direction
In an uncertain environment, meaning fades fast. Antifragile leadership means constantly updating it. This requires simple but powerful questions:
- What do we really want to learn from this situation?
- What does this project reveal about the way we work together?
These conversations anchor cooperation in reality. They avoid the drift towards window-dressing and bring the collective back to basics:
why we do what we do, and how we want to do it.
Developing antifragile leadership means accepting that stability doesn’t exist – but that vitality can be cultivated.
Every tension becomes an opportunity to refine the link, adjust the direction, bring out the collective intelligence.
And, above all, to restore courage to its rightful place: not as a heroic posture, but as a shared practice.
So you’re still hesitating?
You know all this. You read posts every day about uncertainty and vulnerability.
You know that collective intelligence is powerful. You know the results of well-guided cooperation… We talk about it a lot in corporate seminars.
But when you decide to do something different, something resists.
A dull fear of losing face.
Of appearing fragile.
Of no longer living up to your role.
The paradox
This is perhaps the greatest paradox of modern leadership: everyone talks about courage, but few actually practice it.
Lack of time, lack of energy, lack of support, lack of fear. There’s a lack of courage everywhere… and yet no one can stop complaining about the person next door. What irony!
Leaders wear themselves out pretending they’re doing well.
They isolate themselves, armor themselves, then end up doubting themselves – or their teams.
And when fear takes over from curiosity, the organization slowly dies out.
Developing antifragile leadership means accepting complexity, and responding to it with curiosity rather than defense.
It means choosing conscious cooperation instead of mastery-control.
To rediscover a form of joy, the joy of learning, together, in motion, is a wish that we all share.
If you feel that your inner gauge is low, but you don’t want to harden yourself, engage in my antifragile leadership coaching. I aim to help you regain breath, clarity and power to act. It’s also possible that your vitality and integrity will guide you once again. 👉 Discover individual coaching
Is your team going through a period of uncertainty, reorganization or quiet wear and tear?
Leadership Edge team coaching helps groups relearn how to cooperate, say things to each other, and transform tension into constructive energy. 👉 Discover antifragile team coaching
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