Thriving in Chaos?

Strategies to ensure access to critical resources such as water, energy, biodiversity, and agriculture are increasingly framed as “security and resiliency.”

However, in a world of chaos, I now question whether these strategies are adequate to deliver sustainable economic development, business growth, ecosystem health, and social well-being. I believe we need to develop strategies for water, energy, biodiversity, and agriculture that thrive amid chaos.

I am not abandoning security and resiliency strategies and solutions. Instead, I believe we need to ensure that our thinking and strategies are fit for our times.

The question is: what frameworks and platforms are needed to design and execute these antifragile strategies? I believe business ecosystems provide part of the answer to this question.

My thinking on strategies to thrive in chaos converges on two concepts: antifragile strategies and the value of business ecosystems. First, two key resources on these two concepts are Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Business Ecosystems Come of Age by Deloitte University Press.

According to Taleb, most organizations are built for efficiency and optimization. They seek predictability, cost reduction, and control. These traits make them efficient—but often fragile. A tightly optimized supply chain, for example, can collapse when disrupted. A narrowly defined industry position can erode when digital platforms blur boundaries.

Antifragility goes beyond resilience. A resilient organization withstands shocks; an antifragile organization improves because of them. Antifragility requires variability, distributed experimentation, optionality, and decentralized adaptation.

Traditional firms structured around rigid hierarchies and linear supply chains struggle to achieve this. Business ecosystems, by contrast, are inherently more adaptive, which is part of Deloitte's work on business ecosystems.

Deloitte’s Business Ecosystems Come of Age describes how organizations increasingly operate within dynamic, multi-actor networks rather than isolated value chains. These ecosystems consist of diverse participants—incumbents, startups, technology providers, regulators, customers—collaborating and competing simultaneously to deliver value.

Several characteristics of business ecosystems stand out:

Orchestration over Ownership: Leading firms shift from controlling assets to orchestrating relationships. Value is co-created across participants rather than vertically integrated.

Platforms as Infrastructure: Digital platforms provide shared infrastructure for innovation. APIs, shared data standards, and modular architectures enable third parties to plug into the system.

Shared Risk and Shared Opportunity: Ecosystems distribute investment and experimentation across participants, reducing concentrated risk while expanding innovation capacity.

Continuous Evolution: Ecosystems are not static alliances. They evolve as participants enter and exit, technologies shift, and value propositions adapt.

From an antifragility perspective, ecosystems introduce diversity and distributed experimentation—two conditions that allow systems to benefit from volatility. When multiple actors pursue parallel innovation paths, failure becomes localized rather than systemic. Success can scale rapidly across the network.

In contrast to vertically integrated models, ecosystems are more like living systems: adaptive, interconnected, and capable of emergent innovation.

I believe the role of business ecosystems in designing antifragile strategies merits exploring further.

More to follow on this topic and examples of antifragile business ecosystems.

Onward.