Evaluating organizational antifragility via fuzzy logic : the case of an Iranian company producing banknotes and security paper

The concept of antifragility has received much attention from researchers in recent years. Contrary to fragile systems which fail when exposed to stressors, antifragile systems prosper and improve in response to unpredictability, volatility, randomness, chaos and disturbance. The implications of antifragility goes beyond resilience or robustness. A resilient system resists stress and remains the same; while an antifragile system improves. Taleb argues that antifragility is required for dealing with events that he called black swans or X-events, which are scarce, unpredictable, and extreme events. Such events come as a surprise and have major consequences. The concept of antifragility was developed by Taleb in a socioeconomic context, not in industrial production. However, the authors think that this concept may have its greatest practical utilization when applied to industrial environments. Thus, they focused on this concept in the article aiming to investigate the level of antifragility in an organization. In order to perform this, the authors used a case study based on an Iranian manufacturer of banknotes and security paper (TAKAB). Firstly, a questionnaire was designed based on 7 criteria related to antifragility using the five-point Likert scale and a triangular fuzzy number for each linguistic term is defined. In the next phase, the weight of each component was obtained using the entropy technique. In the final stage, the Euclidean distance between the aggregated fuzzy antifragility index (FAI) and each linguistic term used during this case study was calculated. Finally, based on these results, the level of the organization’s antifragility was assessed as satisfactorily antifragile, based on the minimum Euclidean distance.