Antifragile

The principles I use there are a blend of techniques (none of them mine) that I saw work well over time. The central concept that I base all my assumptions around is a book from Nassim Taleb called Antifragile. The core idea in the book is creating systems that thrive in chaos. His take is a lot around financial assumptions but the core concept is broader and I like to apply it to startups and community building as well as life in general.

Ecosystems and communities are high fluctuation environments where talent retention is a big issue and most people that are there are there for the cause, not necessarily for their qualifications. This can be a drawback or an asset, depending on how it's used. Mixing talent from different backgrounds and getting them to work on a common cause makes for high-diversity and therefore high-performance teams. Seemingly unqualified people often bring new ideas for solving problems, pairing them with domain specialists surfaces surprisingly good outcomes. I have seen this in government accelerator programs where we paired public servants with startup founders to create public sector solutions and have seen it in impact hackathons where we paired teacher, lawyer and social worker with software developers to solve problems for charities.

Designing with chaos in mind instead of combating chaos is a hard mental shift but once you land on the other side many organisations seem to fail only because they think that change will never happen. I highly recommend reading Antifragile as it will change how you see the world.