Why Your Organization Needs to Be Antifragile
By Kristen Illes, Principal at Dowling Street
It's 2024, and suddenly everyone's talking about the WNBA like it's an overnight success. Caitlin Clark! Angel Reese! Sold-out arenas! But here's what the "overnight success" narrative completely misses: the WNBA spent years getting knocked down, dusting themselves off, and figuring out how to use each setback as fuel for what came next.
As Commissioner Cathy Engelbert shares in her recent Harvard Business Review piece, "The WNBA's story is a case study in perseverance and strategy execution." What we're really seeing is something even more powerful—a masterclass in antifragile leadership. The league didn't just survive decades of being underestimated and underfunded. They used that adversity to build something stronger, more authentic, and ultimately more valuable than anyone imagined possible.
And that's exactly what your organization needs to learn to do.
The Big Lie About "Overnight Success"
Here's what bothers me about how we talk about success in America: we love the overnight story. The sudden breakthrough. The moment everything changes.
But here's something about real transformation that most people miss—it's not about the moment things get better. It's about learning to use the hard stuff as raw material for building something stronger.
The WNBA had what the Commissioner described as "a strong foundation in our brand ,which emphasized the power of women and sports," but the organization as a whole—the league, the teams, the media coverage, the sponsor ecosystem—needed to transform. They could have spent decades complaining about unfair treatment (and honestly, they would have been right to). Instead, they spent energy on building antifragile muscle with a 3 pillar strategy: "player first, drive stakeholder success, and work on transforming the fan experience."
What's antifragile muscle? It's the organizational equivalent of what happens when you break a bone and it heals back stronger than it was before. The concept comes from Nassim Taleb, who writes, "Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors." Most organizations think there are only two options when bad things happen: you either break (fragile) or you bounce back (resilient). But there's a third option that changes everything: you can emerge stronger from whatever tries to knock you down.
Why "Bouncing Back" Isn't Good Enough Anymore
The appeal of resilience is understandable. It sounds tough. It sounds admirable. But here's the problem with bouncing back—it assumes where you were before was good enough.
According to the Accenture 2024 Pulse of Change Index, the rate of change in business has increased 183% over just the past four years. In that environment, bouncing back to where you started is like showing up to a car race on horseback. You might have been fast once, but the game has completely changed.
The WNBA understood this intuitively. They knew that simply bouncing back to "the way things were" wasn't going to cut it. Instead, they used every challenge—low attendance, limited media coverage, financial constraints—as information about what needed to change.
That's antifragile thinking: instead of asking "How do we get back to normal?" they asked "How do we use this to build something better?"
The Three Ways Organizations Handle Trouble
Organizations typically respond to crisis in three ways:
Fragile organizations are like fine china—beautiful when everything's going smoothly, but one good shake and they're in pieces on the floor. These are the places with rigid processes, too much debt, and leaders who treat any deviation from the plan like a personal attack.
Resilient organizations are like those inflatable punching bags from childhood—they get knocked down but always pop back up to their original position. They're proud of "weathering storms" and "getting back to normal." Which is fine, except when normal was what was problematic in the first place.
Antifragile organizations are like muscles under stress—they don't just recover, they adapt and grow stronger. They look at disruption and think, "How can we use this?"
The WNBA became antifragile by necessity. When you spend decades being told you don't matter, you either fold or you figure out how to turn that dismissal into rocket fuel. They chose rocket fuel.
The Secret Sauce: The Barbell Strategy
Here's where it gets practical. The most successful antifragile organizations—whether it's the WNBA or that scrappy nonprofit that somehow thrives while others struggle—use what Taleb calls a "barbell strategy."
As he puts it, it's "a combination of two extremes, one safe and one speculative, deemed more robust than a 'monomodal' strategy." Picture an actual barbell: heavy weights on both ends, nothing in the mushy middle. That's how antifragile organizations allocate everything:
About 90% goes to rock-solid, mission-critical operations that keep the lights on and deliver on your core promise. For the WNBA, this meant maintaining the quality of play and staying true to their brand values around women's empowerment.
About 10% goes to high-risk, high-reward experiments that could either fail spectacularly or change everything. For the WNBA, this might have meant new marketing approaches, innovative partnerships, and bold media strategies.
What you avoid is the middle ground—moderate risks that can hurt you without offering proportional rewards.
This can apply to:
People: Most of your team should be reliable pros (90%), with some wildcards and fresh perspectives (10%) who challenge assumptions and bring new energy
Strategy: Keep your core solid (90%) while running small experiments (10%) that could 10x your impact
Culture: Standardize what works (90%) while maintaining pockets of creative chaos (10%) where new ideas can emerge
The beautiful math: you can never lose more than 10% of anything, but your upside is unlimited.
Four Ways to Build Antifragile Muscle
1. Get Comfortable with Productive Stress
Just like people don't heal by avoiding all difficulty, organizations get stronger by learning to handle increasingly challenging situations successfully.
The WNBA didn't get stronger by avoiding criticism or financial pressure. They got stronger by using those challenges as training for the next level. Smart leaders regularly introduce small challenges that stretch their teamswithout breaking them.
2. Build Options, Not Predictions
The organizations that do best aren't the ones that have their futures perfectly planned out. They're the ones that build multiple pathways to success.
The WNBA Commissioner emphasizes that "all decisions must be made through the lens of guiding strategy," but within that framework, they built optionality. Multiple revenue streams, diverse partnerships, different ways to engage fans. When one door closes, you have three others ready to open.
3. Give Your People Real Authority
The organizations that thrive are the ones that push decision-making down to the people closest to the action. You keep strategy centralized but give your teams real autonomy to respond quickly to what they're seeing.
4. Make Sure Everyone Has Skin in the Game
This isn't about punishment—it's about alignment. When people share in both the upside and downside of their decisions, they make better choices and commit harder to making things work.
Three Things You Can Do This Quarter
Ready to start building antifragile muscle? Here are three moves you can make right now:
The 10% Fund: Set aside 10% of your budget for experiments that might fail but could be game-changing if they succeed. Track these like investments, not expenses.
The Quarterly Stress Test: Once every three months, run your organization through a "what if" scenario that would normally keep you awake at night. Don't just identify problems—use these scenarios to build capabilities.
The Options Audit: Look at your recent major decisions. How many created future possibilities versus closing them down? Going forward, bias toward choices that open doors rather than slamming them shut.
The Mindset Shift That Changes Everything
Here's what research shows: the biggest barrier isn't lack of tools or techniques. It's how leaders think about adversity itself.
Most leaders treat uncertainty as the enemy—something to minimize, control, or defend against. Antifragile leaders have learned to see uncertainty as raw material for competitive advantage.
The WNBA's 2024 breakthrough wasn't luck or timing—it was the result of decades of building that muscle. Every setback taught them something. Every obstacle became information about what needed to change. Every "no" became fuel for a better "yes" down the road.
Your Choice
Look, the world isn't getting more predictable. AI is reshaping industries overnight. Workforce expectations change faster than strategic planning cycles. The economic landscape shifts before budgets can be adjusted.
The WNBA could have spent decades complaining about unfair treatment. Instead, they built something unfair treatment couldn't touch: an authentic brand, a passionate fanbase, and organizational muscle that gets stronger under pressure.
Whether you're running a Fortune 500 company or a local nonprofit, the choice is the same: Will you spend energy trying to control uncertainty, or will you learn to use it as fuel?
Because the organizations that master this shift won't just survive the next disruption—they'll define what comes after it.
Sources:
Engelbert, Cathy. "How We Did It." Harvard Business Review, May/June 2025.
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Random House, 2012.
Accenture. "2024 Pulse of Change Index." Accenture, 2024.
Ready to start building antifragile muscle? Begin with 10% experiments that can't break you but might transform you.