The Dellanna Diagrams

People are antifragile. It’s a concept first defined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his homonymous book, and it describes what benefits from problems and variation.

To facilitate the understanding of this complex topic, I created a simple visual tool, which my students came to call the Dellanna Diagram.

For example, this muscle describes the reaction of our muscles when we lift weights:

• If the weights are light, we lift them effortlessly, but nothing happens. We are in the yellow area.
• If the weights are heavy, we lift them with some effort, which triggers biological mechanisms that grow our muscles and make us stronger. We are in the green area.
• If the weights are too heavy, we injure ourselves. We are in the red area.

This diagram applies to almost every reaction people have to external stressors, problems, and feedback.

As another example, imagine your manager at work assigns you an objective:

• If the objective is too easy, you don’t learn anything. You are in the yellow area.
• If the objective is moderately hard, you learn something from it and become a better employee. You are in the green area, and that’s an antifragile reaction.
• If the objective is too hard, you might get frustrated and lose motivation, or you might even fail and lose your boss’ trust. You are in the red area, and that’s a fragile reaction.

The Dellanna Diagram is a useful tool for understanding how to become more antifragile.

Before explaining this, let me clarify a common misunderstanding. Antifragility is not the ability to merely survive problems or variations but to benefit from them.

This is very important because if you merely aim to make yourself or your organization robust to problems, you will promote behaviors that leverage rigidity – a property that decreases antifragility. In fact, a rigid person or organization wants to minimize and avoid problems, whereas antifragile people and organizations do the opposite: they proactively surface problems in order to adapt to them.

Creating engagement

It might seem like the Dellanna Diagram of disengaged students and disengaged employees looks like the one below: problems are either too easy, triggering complacency (the yellow area), or too hard, triggering paralysis or frustration (the red area).