The Antifragile Hydra

What an ancient Greek monster can teach you about gaining from disorder.

The concept of antifragility often comes up in conversations about strategy and long-term vision. Unfortunately, many take antifragility to mean “non-fragility,” that is, robustness. But the two concepts are different, and it’s crucial to understand how if you want to take the leap from surviving to thriving.

Nassim Taleb defined antifragility in his 2012 book Antifragile as the property of gaining from disorder.

In the book, Taleb illustrates the concept from different angles with anecdotes and vignettes. One that made it click for me is that of the Hydra.

Hydra, in Greek mythology, is a serpent-like creature that dwells in the lake of Lerna, near Argos, and has numerous heads. Each time one is cut off, two grow back in its place. So harm is what it likes. Hydra represents antifragility.

If the Hydra were simply robust, cutting one of its heads off would be hard. But cutting one of its heads is easy enough. It’s what happens next that makes the difference: because for every head cut off, two new ones sprout.

The Hydra is antifragile not because it can’t be hurt, but because when it gets hurt it becomes stronger. And the more it gets hurt, the stronger it gets.

Remember, antifragility means improving from disorder. So Hydra is antifragile because it improves from the special kind of disorder that is having one of your heads chopped off.

Later, Taleb remarks that the only way to defeat the Hydra was to destroy its means of antifragility.

The way Heracles managed to control Hydra was by cauterizing the wounds on the stumps of the heads that he had just severed. He thus prevented the regrowth of the heads and the exercise of antifragility. In other words, he disrupted the recovery.

In business and in life, becoming antifragile takes more than removing sources of fragility, diversifying, or toughening up. It requires a setup where disorder actually makes you better. That is much more challenging to implement than the already non-trivial task of remaining in business year after year, with market changes, economic fluctuations, and technological disruption.

Taleb writes of Hydra, “harm is what it likes.” To embracing harm and disorder as fuel for growth, to actually look forward to it, that is perhaps the most challenging step towards becoming antifragile. It’s possibly why, despite how sensible it sounds on paper, it’s hard to implement true antifragility outside of niches such as investing, where Taleb developed the concept.

Next time someone proposes a way to make a system antifragile, compare it the Hydra. When disorder hits the modified system, what happens next? Does it sprout new heads and grow stronger, merely resist, or collapse?