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Key points
- In supply chains, antifragility is characterized by systems or entities that improve and adapt in response to stress, disorder, or uncertainty
- Antifragile supply chains prioritize flexibility, adaptability, and continuous improvement to thrive in unpredictable environments
- Embracing antifragility in supply chains requires a shift from traditional risk management to a proactive, adaptable approach
- Implementing antifragile supply chains involves embracing complexity, building redundancy, and fostering innovation
Here at Shippeo, we’ve been making antifragility our priority for the best part of a year now; indeed, we’d like to be known as the company that helps you build antifragile and sustainable supply chains. It essentially implies surpassing resilience to build a sort of immune system for handling supply chain disruptions. But what does it really mean beyond that? Let’s find out…
Disruption - the new normal
From port strikes to congestion, to material and labor shortages and from natural disasters to armed conflicts, as 2025 began, disruption was already the new normal. And that was before The United States’ “Liberation Day” tariffs, which have since caused unprecedented upheaval across global supply chains, with activity in some major ports suddenly dropping to COVID-period levels.
These factors and more are driving a complete paradigm shift for Chief Supply Chain Officers (CSCOs), as Shippeo’s CPO Anand Medepalli last explained on our webinar with PwC, in February 2025. CSCOs’ traditional challenges - Reducing cost, Managing inventory, Supporting growth and Improving service - have now been joined by new ones, namely Engaging employees, Meeting customer expectations, Improving sustainability and Managing risks and volatility; the latter being, perhaps, the biggest challenge of all.
As Elmira Seitakhmetova, Senior Manager at PwC Belgium pointed out during the same webinar, these concerns were recently confirmed by PwC’s study (source):
CSCOs’ top 3 concerns for the foreseeable future are Expanding ESG Compliance; Evolving technological advances (think AI…); and Increasing frequency of severe supply chain disruptions.
From Resilience to Antifragility
As Gartner now famously affirmed in 2023, 95% of the companies that once said they would be resilient by 2026 have given up on that objective halfway through their journey.
Why? According to Medepalli, they’re looking at it all wrong. “Organizations have been spending a lot of energy trying to be resilient. Resilience helps you manage one thing at a time, but when the disruptions repeat themselves, or too many happen at once, how do organizations respond? They have to move to the next step - antifragility - whereby through learning from a certain number of disruptions, they know how to deal with the next 10, 15 or 20 considerably more easily, without having to start from scratch each time. Exactly how vaccines work, in fact.”
The term “antifragility” was coined by author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who joined Medepalli on another Shippeo webinar, last year. Taleb is a probability expert, known for his 2007 “Black Swan” book, which defined the term, referring to highly improbable events.
“The bigger you are, the more fragile you are”, said Taleb, urging us to compare an elephant with a mouse: one or the other falling down will have dramatically different effects. Or, to put it another way, “smashing your car 100 times at 1mph is better than once at 100mph. Some things need disorder as a learning process. No pain, no gain!” he added.
Whence the need to move from fragility to antifragility, passing through resilience on the way. As Medepalli put it:
- Fragile = easily damaged or destroyed by volatility
- Resilient = resists damage but doesn’t necessarily benefit from it
- Antifragile = actively learns from uncertainty, becomes more capable with each shock or disruption.
How can this translate to a corporate context? “The most effective indicator of a fragile company is steady earnings,” said Taleb. “It means they’re not facing challenges. Maybe they have a big government contract. Governments change, people retire, have different friends… so if you have very steady earnings, that means you’re not learning.”
Antifragility applied to Supply Chains
Rule number one, according to Medepalli: “Don’t waste your time forecasting events: build blanket redundancies or robustness against these events. Today, supply chains’ raison d’être is squeezing cost out. This has meant that people went with ‘just-in-time’ or ‘lean’ inventory strategies, because holding inventory meant more cost. With antifragility, you’re talking about redundancy, rather than crazily trying to be always efficient, optimal. This calls for scenario planning, i.e. having a response scenario ready for each type of disruption. So when upheaval happens, you roll out the relevant scenario, rather than reinventing the wheel every time.”
“COVID taught us to ignore the accountant and focus on the risk manager,” concurred Taleb, adding: “Silicon Valley is the most booming place in the world; it also has the highest rate of bankruptcy in the world. So collectively, it learns from errors.”
What do you need to be able to make errors and learn from them? Trust. “Trust is a massive currency in supply chain,” said Medepalli. “No regulation says ‘you shall deliver by this date’. Yes, contractual penalties exist. But the ability for trading partners to function with just trust as a fundamental currency is an amazing sight to behold. But therein lies the fragility, because each handover is a risk item.”
“You’re only as strong as your weakest point, when the shock comes,” concluded Taleb. “If you can eliminate or reduce the fragility, you’ll be better off than other players. Those who (over) engage in probabilistic [strategies] open themselves to fragilities. Make sure you’re robust without the probabilities. Because you know what can happen when you think something’s unlikely…”
AI and Antifragility
AI is increasingly touted as a magic wand solution for countless problems. Can it help with antifragility?
“AI is not the panacea,” warned Medepalli. “‘Human in the loop’ is a critical requirement for your AI to work. Of course, AI and machine learning help us catch up with patterns faster than statistical modeling. But once you engage, for the system to learn what you did so that pattern recognition becomes faster, it’s a continuous improvement process. The mindset is of learning, and the day you stop learning is the day you cease to succeed.”
“The way it’s designed, AI does not understand risk. They’re just probabilistic machines”, agreed Taleb. “By design, they’re made to intra-polate, not extrapolate. Humans can do that, not models. AI is great. But you must have someone twice as paranoid as a normal person on top of that, for risk management. AI creates efficiencies, which can be a fool’s trap. It may increase productivity, but you know what that means for supply chains: more traffic, and [hence] more problems!
How Shippeo helps foster Antifragility
“Risk planning is now huge,” said Medepalli. “All major countries now demand that you know who is involved in your supply chain, from seven to ten layers deep. This means you may one day need to plan the risk level of (accidentally) doing business with an oligarch somewhere.”
Shippeo allows this transition by placing shippers into a continuous learning loop. For example, with the Renault Group’s Control Tower solution, that embeds the Shippeo platform, the car manufacturer can identify crisis points in advance thanks to Shippeo’s predictions - for example, delayed shipment arrivals due to blocked ports or border crossings - and then identify solutions based on the Control Tower’s recommendations.
This way, alternative options - for example, finding replacement modes of transportation - can be put in place quickly and effortlessly, so that supply chains are not disrupted. In Renault’s case, this makes untold business sense: even stopping a production line for a few minutes to wait for late parts can represent tens of thousands in lost revenue.
Such solutions demonstrate that antifragility is starting to take off in the supply chain world. Related trends include Agile manufacturing, or the possibility to adjust production rapidly in response to changing market conditions; Resilient disruption, or networks that can easily adapt to disruptions; and Collaboration, where information is shared proactively with trading partners, thereby optimizing supply chains end-to-end.
More concretely, as Medepalli puts it, Antifragile supply chains need three systems:
- System of information - “if I know what’s going on, I can at least have a headstart”
- System of engagement - “of these 100 things that could go wrong, here are the 5 you should engage with”
- System of Resolution - “can I predict, and therefore pre-cook an answer to a given crisis, so I can be ready to respond quickly?”
Or, as PwC’s Seitakhmetova puts it, antifragile solutions need to consider Technology, People and Processes:
- Technology - be it Control Towers, predictive ETAs, API Connectivity or Edge computing, supply chain visibility can be achieved through a combination of various existing technologies, rather than relying on just one
- People, because 70% of transformations fail due to lack of user adoption and behavioral change. Effective communication, training, and upskilling are essential, but changing behaviour and ways of working is equally important. RTTV empowers employees to stay informed and proactive, rather than adopting a wait-and-see approach. It's crucial to enhance problem-solving and continuous improvement skills to foster a proactive workforce
- Processes as such need to be Simple and user-friendly; Standardized across all regions, teams and stakeholders as far as possible.
Why bother with Antifragility?
You may be quite happy with the solutions and methods you already have. But thinking about how RTTV solutions can pave the way for antifragile supply chains…
PwC has established that companies that have successfully implemented visibility solutions have:
- 2.4x more profitability
- 15% higher on-time delivery, and as such greater customer satisfaction
- 3x more agility, or supply chain flexibility
- 1/3 savings in logistics costs
- ESG compliance: CO2 reduction, traceability, monitoring and reporting.
In other words, an antifragile approach, empowered by RTTV, can provide answers to all of the CSCO pain points identified by PwC, namely Expanding ESG Compliance; Evolving technological advances; and Increasing frequency of severe supply chain disruptions, to name just the top three.
It’s a fascinating conversation, which we look forward to continuing with you moving forwards! Book a demo to find out more…
