“Roll with the punches.”

In business, just like in boxing, getting hit is an inevitability. Upsets will come when you least expect them, and unless you can adapt and move with them—the way a boxer moves his body to decrease the impact—you’re going to get knocked down.

But here’s the thing: if all you’re doing is rolling with the punches, something is wrong. You’re just getting hit over and over again. Why are you constantly on the defensive? Where are your punches? In the past, a successful supply chain was one that simply managed risk and was resilient in the face of adversity. Today, you need to update your strategy—unless you plan to spend your entire future on the ropes.

In today’s marketplace, disruption goes far beyond systems or technology. A disruption today means an overarching paradigm shift, a change that affects every level of an organization. If you want to survive in this marketplace where 100-year-old practices are regularly swept aside by the emerging trends and leaps of progress—not just survive but thrive—look to the supply chain. Often overlooked, the supply chain needs to be fortified and made antifragile to ensure it never falls to the dreaded black swan. And you can do that by learning to recognize black swans and working to become antifragile, i.e., fixing that glass jaw and staying in the fight when you get knocked.

Recognize the Dreaded Black Swan

In economic theory, a black swan is any rare, unprecedented event or situation with implications for your organization. Black swans can be anything, from severe weather to political upheavals, natural disasters to economic downturns, emergent technology to public scandals. In general, you can identify a black swan by three main characteristics:

• Black swans are outliers. They are unexpected because they have never occurred before and exist outside of prior experience.
• Black swans carry extreme impact. They’re dramatic. No matter what you do, things will never be the same.
• Black swans invite investigation. Once a black swan has occurred, we work to find explanations and ways of predicting them.

Further, it’s key to remember this: a black swan event is in the eye of the beholder. As Nassim Taleb famously described it, “A Black Swan for the turkey is not a Black Swan for the butcher.” What is a challenge for your organization is an opening for another.

Prepare by Becoming Antifragile

According to Taleb’s theory of antifragility, it is pointless for an organization to simply try to prevent or survive the coming of a black swan. Instead, organizations must develop and then implement strategies that allow them to harness the black swan in such a way that it pulls them ahead of the competition. Even if your swan is black, you can turn it white.

You see, an organization’s system is fragile when it is unprepared to meet changing conditions. For example, Kodak wasn’t ready for photography to move from film to digital. Blockbuster explicitly refused to partner with Netflix. And more than 170,000 American small businesses closed between 2008 and 2010, done in by the recession. While we cannot predict these black swans, we can work to reduce the fragility within our systems.

But we can take 

antifragility even further by exploring something I like to call “customer-centric antifragility:” rather than focusing on protecting themselves from black swans, companies need strategies in place to (a) minimize the impact of those events on their customers and (b) benefit from those same disruptions. Doing so fosters a stronger business–client relationship. The business will be strengthened and grow thanks to the most precious and hard-won commodity of all: trust.

Achieving this level of antifragility is a daily struggle. You must be offensive and proactive, not defensive and reactive. I recommend the following approaches:

• Don’t strive for resilience: BE resilient.
• Understand that complexity is a certainty in life.
• Stop competing with others: the only company you need to surpass is your own.
• Update your goals as frequently as the world’s technology advances.
• Never settle; the only acceptable outcome is perfection, and you’ll only ever come close to it by remaining diligent and moving forward continuously.

At Bristlecone, we’ve developed and launched an antifragility index designed to help organizations measure and predict supply chain vulnerabilities and operational readiness. By leveraging the A-Index, you can perform analysis in advance, and be prepared for when the system shocks actually come, rather than having your system exposed by disruptive events and assessing the damage afterward.

Know this: You’ve entered the ring. The bell has rung. The blows will come. But you can do more than roll with the punches. Consider my advice and go on the offensive—not just for yourself, but for your clients as well. When the blows come, you’ll come out stronger than ever.