ACT V: THE DAMAGE — What the system does to people
Believe it or not, doing things wrong has value. What value? Doing it.
Even though in any activity, the end goal is supposedly doing things well, because that's how objectives are achieved, many workplaces settle for simply doing it.
The thing is, ultimately, only by "doing it" is the true objective achieved: making the economic balance tip toward profitability.
In this context, extremely valuable are the people who are capable of doing it, however it may be, because they become the executors of the activity, the generators of results, the responsible parties and therefore the guilty ones when the product or service is not as desired.
Those who carry out the activity are extremely important for the business, regardless of how well they do it. And this happens, among other reasons, because business leaders know that any business is full of problems; there are always points to improve, and things that are not done but you survive without them.
Like the pilot who lands a wrecked plane safely. There are people who carry the operation on their shoulders and make things happen despite everything. Despite the obstacles, the lack of resources, the stupidity of others, the lack of management. They make it happen.
This characteristic is so important that many selection processes incorporate it, but with another form. With adjectives like: "tolerance for frustration," "resilience," "assertiveness."
This is problematic, not because of the meaning that the adjective has for Psychology, but because of the deformation that businesses have managed to give these adjectives. The business takes from these adjectives what serves it. When the business seeks "assertive" people, in most cases it's not looking for a person whose behavior is psychologically assertive, but rather it seeks a moldable person, a cheap person, a person who can do things wrong without making any noise, who can receive blame without transmitting it, who can support the weight of a poorly designed structure without "negatively" affecting the organization.
Then, the business generates a double bind: it asks for "commitment" to the objectives, to quality, to efficiency; but above all it asks for "commitment" to carry out the activity... when at the end of the day, achieving both at the same time is unlikely.
The Taleb Connection
There's an important distinction the article keeps circling.
"Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better." — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile (2012), Prologue
The corporate use of "resilience" — tolerance for frustration, assertiveness — is the first kind. The shock arrives, the worker absorbs it, and the worker is returned unchanged to absorb the next one. That's a business asking for resilience: a person who will not transmit the cost upward.
The system the article describes wants the appearance of antifragility without paying for it. Things keep getting shipped, the wrecked plane keeps landing, the impossible deadlines keep being met. From outside, that looks like a robust organisation. From inside, it's the worker absorbing the volatility. The system doesn't get better — it learns that a person will keep absorbing, and stops investing in anything that would change that.
The double bind — be committed to excellence, and to executing in a system that makes excellence impossible — is the trap that specific deformation produces. The people who survive aren't the most talented. They're the ones who learned to absorb without flagging the absorption.
This article was translated from the 2012 Spanish original and revised in 2026 through human-AI collaboration — clarifying transitions and adding connections to Nassim Taleb's framework.