Nassim Nicholas Taleb popularized the idea of the black swan: a rare, hard-to-predict event with an outsized impact. Yet, in a continuously unpredictable world, it’s perhaps another of his lesser-known ideas that resonates more deeply for boards. In his 2012 book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Taleb described systems that do not merely resist shocks, but actually improve through volatility, stress, and disorder.
For boards, this feels particularly relevant. The objective should not simply be to help organizations survive disruption, but to build the capacity to learn, adapt, and emerge stronger when assumptions prove to be incorrect.
For decades, boards have mainly been asked to provide effective oversight and safeguard the interests of the company. Governance, compliance, financial performance, and risk oversight have rightly occupied much of the agenda. These responsibilities remain fundamental, but the evolving global landscape is forcing boards to reassess how their role should adapt. Geopolitical tensions, economic fragmentation, disruptive technologies, cyber threats, extreme weather events, and shifting consumer expectations are no longer occasional interruptions to an otherwise relatively stable environment. They form the environment itself.
Protecting the company against foreseeable risks is no longer sufficient. Boards must help ensure their organizations are resilient across a range of scenarios, including those that may appear to have a low probability but could have severe consequences. How can boards help organizations become antifragile?
Having spent much of my executive career in the reinsurance industry, I have come to appreciate that uncertainty is the natural state in which important decisions are made. Reinsurers have long accepted that the future cannot be forecast with precision. They use sophisticated models to stress-test their own risk exposures and consider multiple shock scenarios to diversify risks and better manage volatility. Resilience does not mean avoiding volatility or eliminating uncertainty; it means having the capacity to absorb shocks, adapt to changing circumstances, and continue to perform when events unfold differently from expectations.
Antifragility takes this logic one step further. It suggests building in optionality, avoiding excessive dependence on a single forecast, preserving sufficient buffers, and learning from manageable stress before a larger shock arrives. Through conversations with board members across industries, I have observed a growing focus on scenario analysis. Yet much remains to be done to translate this growing awareness into a meaningful shift in practice. I see five areas where chairs and boards can make that shift more tangible.
A board that never creates space to look beyond the next reporting cycle will struggle to build optionality before it is needed.
Board agendas need to adapt to the uncertain and volatile environment. As an executive, I devoted an inordinate amount of time to reviewing historical performance, monitoring compliance, and examining operational performance indicators. These remain essential fiduciary responsibilities, but they should not prevent boards from creating sufficient room to discuss industry dynamics, technological change, competitor intelligence, new entrants, and emerging trends that could affect the company’s strategy and business model. Â
The answer is not to weaken oversight, but to manage the board’s scarce attention more deliberately. Chairs can reserve time for forward-looking discussions and use selected deep dives on external developments. A board that never creates space to look beyond the next reporting cycle will struggle to build optionality before it is needed.Â
The relationship between boards and management should change too. The distinction between corporate governance and executive management must remain clear, but uncertainty demands more frequent and deeper strategic dialogue. Chairs should make sure their boards do not micromanage strategy execution, but they should encourage directors to help management test assumptions, explore alternative scenarios, and identify emerging risks and opportunities before they become obvious.Â
That can mean asking management to present not only its recommended plan, but the critical assumptions on which it depends, the indicators that would show those assumptions are weakening, and the alternative actions available if circumstances change. A board should ask how exposed the business would be, what second-order effects might follow, and which strategic options could be activated.
The objective is not to predict the next shock correctly, but to increase the capacity to respond when assumptions prove wrong.
Traditionally, boards have approached risk management primarily through the lenses of controls, compliance, and mitigation. While these elements remain indispensable, many of today’s risks are interconnected, fast-moving, and difficult to quantify. Geopolitical developments, cyber vulnerabilities, artificial intelligence, and supply-chain dependencies illustrate how quickly risks can cascade across companies and industries.
Viewing these risks differently means moving beyond a stand-alone risk discussion and examining them simultaneously through the lenses of downside exposure, strategic consequence, and potential opportunity. In practice, boards can select a few material uncertainties and examine each one from both sides: What could disrupt the business model? What might change consumer behavior or industry economics? Where could the company gain competitive advantage if it moves earlier?
Boards should allocate more time to simulation exercises that stress-test strategic assumptions. The objective is not to predict the next shock correctly, but to increase the capacity to respond when assumptions prove wrong. Simulation exercises can reveal hidden dependencies, clarify decision rights, and show where additional technological or management capabilities could create room to maneuver.Â
This places particular responsibility on the chair. More than any other individual, the chair determines whether the board spends its limited time discussing the issues that will shape the company’s future. Effective chairs create an environment where directors feel comfortable challenging prevailing assumptions, where diverse perspectives are actively encouraged, and where difficult conversations are neither postponed nor avoided.Â
Chairs can foster this by circulating the central strategic questions in advance rather than overloading directors with presentation material; inviting the less-heard voices into the discussion before consensus forms; asking explicitly what the board may be missing; and separating constructive challenge from personal criticism. They can use executive sessions without management when appropriate, while ensuring that the conclusions feed back into an open dialogue with the CEO. The aim is not to seek disagreement, but to prevent groupthink or premature consensus.Â
The most effective chairs I have seen in action put board performance management and succession planning high on their priority list. A board cannot credibly challenge an organization to remain adaptable if it does not regularly ask itself the same question: do we still have the right combination of skills, experience, and perspectives around the table for the future?Â
Effective chairs set sharper expectations for prospective directors and incumbents, with more stringent performance standards and regular appraisals, informed by robust feedback rather than relying primarily on self-assessments. Succession should be viewed not simply as replacing departing directors, but as an opportunity to anticipate the capabilities the organization will need tomorrow. That requires looking beyond today’s skills matrix and asking which expertise and perspectives may become critical over the next three to five years. This may also require the willingness to refresh a board before a formal vacancy arises. Board renewal becomes an exercise in antifragility: using changes in the environment to strengthen the board’s capacity to deal with the next set of challenges and opportunities.Â
While Taleb’s black swan caught the imagination and helped to make sense of our changing world, his concept of antifragility offers boards a practical reference point against which to test and effectively evolve their contributions: not just whether the organization can withstand the next disruption, but whether it is structured to learn from volatility and become stronger because of it.
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