Authors: Janka Krings-Klebe and Jörg Schreiner are leading strategy experts, speakers and lecturers on digital transformation, agile management, innovation and business ecosystems. Drawing on their extensive hands-on experience, they challenge traditional implementations and demonstrate how embracing volatility can enable organizations to survive in an era of relentless change. They frequently contribute to podcasts and publications of Thinkers50, Project Management Institute, Duke CE’s Dialogue Review, and The Global Peter Drucker Forum. They are the authors of The Antifragile Organization: From Hierarchies to Ecosystems (2025). For this work, they were shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Strategy Award in 2025.
Traditional risk management has taught organizations to identify threats, assess their likelihood and impact, and implement measures to prevent or mitigate them. These practices remain valuable and necessary. Yet with complexity, accelerating change, and growing interconnectedness, organizations frequently encounter situations that cannot be fully anticipated. The most significant risks and opportunities often emerge from developments that were not visible beforehand. This raises a fundamental question: how do organizations navigate uncertainty when the map is incomplete?
A useful metaphor is that of an expedition moving through unknown territory. When the route is known, progress can be planned in detail. Hazards can be identified in advance, resources allocated efficiently, and contingencies prepared. In unexplored terrain, the challenge changes entirely. The expedition cannot rely solely on existing knowledge. It must learn its way forward.
Instead of committing all resources to a single route, the expedition sends out scouting teams to explore the surrounding landscape. Some encounter obstacles, dead ends, or hidden dangers. Others discover promising paths. Every team contributes valuable information about the terrain. Findings are shared, patterns emerge, and the expedition adjusts its direction accordingly.
This image captures how antifragile organizations approach risk. Their primary objective is not to eliminate uncertainty but to build the capacity to operate successfully within it. They recognize that future conditions cannot always be predicted and that adaptability is therefore a central organizational capability. As a result, they create structures and practices that support exploration, learning, and rapid adjustment.
Maintaining diversity of options is one expression of this. Different products, business models, markets, partnerships, technologies, and teams create a broader field of observation and increase the likelihood of discovering emerging opportunities or recognizing threats early. Redundancy plays a structural role alongside this. Spare capacity, overlapping capabilities, and alternative resources appear inefficient during stable periods. In dynamic environments they provide the freedom to explore and respond quickly when circumstances change, creating room for maneuver.
Autonomy strengthens this capacity further. Scouts in the field cannot wait for every decision to be approved by a distant command center. They must assess local conditions, act on what they observe, and communicate their findings. Antifragile organizations push decision-making closer to customers, markets, and operational realities, shortening learning cycles and increasing responsiveness. Experimentation follows naturally. Every exploratory move generates information. Some initiatives succeed, others fail, and both outcomes deepen the organization’s understanding of the environment. Small experiments help discover opportunities, reveal hidden risks, and challenge assumptions before large commitments are made.
Underlying all of this is a question of pace. The expedition does not move as fast as possible. It moves at the pace at which it can learn. When conditions change faster than information can be gathered, interpreted, and acted upon, progress becomes difficult. Sustainable advancement depends on maintaining a rhythm in which exploration, learning, and adaptation reinforce one another.
Viewed through this lens, risk management becomes more than the reduction of threats. It becomes the management of exploration. Antifragile organizations seek to ensure that no single decision, strategy, or failure can threaten their survival, while continuously increasing their ability to learn from changing conditions. Like a well-organized expedition, they advance through uncertainty by combining diversity, autonomy, redundancy, experimentation, and a disciplined attention to learning pace.
In an unpredictable business environment, their strength lies not in having a perfect map, but in developing the capability to understand and take advantage of new terrain as they move through it.