Get better when things get worse
Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the term antifragile a while back to describe something that thrives in a broader state of disorder; while other things collapse, it thrives, and when everything is going well, it’s harder for that thing to survive. Kind of the opposite of what we think should happen in broader systems of destruction.
And at a dinner recently, the stoner thought arrived: is Draft antifragile? Economically, we are not the definition of antifragile. The business has a lot of fixed costs. We pay the home office’s mortgage through the s-corp, so there is debt to speak of. Literally the aforelinked book cites a high-powered CEO as precisely not the definiton of antifragile.
And yet if you think of antifragile as the idea of getting better while everything gets worse, Draft… kind of fits that description? All of our clients fired us in March of 2020, and then we went on to our best year ever, because all of the food & pet businesses popped off and needed us to make sense of it – to say nothing of software or apparel.
We are witnessing a similar situation now, of course, with the current apocalypse likely causing the full-scale destruction of small business & knowledge work in America. On the one hand, our longest-term client parted ways because they don’t plan on having a business in a month. On the other, we just hired three more.
Despite everything, we have no idea what actually motivates a person to buy design from us. The sample size is small; we work with a variety of businesses; the urgent, expensive problems are bespoke; everybody has their own circumstances. We prefer people to buy design because they’re excited to analyze the present & create the future, but we know reality is messier than that. People buy design to clean up messes. People buy design to dig themselves out of holes. People buy design to make sense of why they’ve plateaued. People buy design because their business is abject chaos, and they need to understand what to do about it.
Perhaps the apocalypse is causing others to recognize they cannot do this alone, and to tun outward in search of a solution. When that happens, we’re here.