Monthly Archives February 2013

I started writing a piece about ‘antifragility’ in technical and organizational management, and it kept leaking out into the territory occupied by Boyd, Habermas, and Rittel/Webber.

In 1973, Horst Rittel and Mel Webber wrote “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” a monograph that introduced the concept of ‘wicked problems.’ Disclaimer: I studied under Rittel at UC Berkeley in the late ‘70s.

Also in 1973, Jurgen Habermas published his seminal book “Legitimation Crisis” in Germany (an English edition came out in 1975).

In 1978, Col. John Boyd first presented his famous briefing “Patterns of Conflict.”

And in 2012, Nassim Taleb published “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
,” a prescriptive book based on his earlier work in “Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets” and “The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: “On Robustness and Fragility”