Why Software Integration Is Essential for Building an Antifragile Business
In the past few years, many businesses have been stretched to the breaking point.
Look around your industry and you’ll find no shortage of signs of this. Mass layoffs are rampant as organizations try to save on overhead. Growth signals are decreasing. Everyone’s mind is on resiliency and hanging on through difficult times.
That makes antifragility — and, by extension, software integration — more important than ever.
What does antifragile mean?
This idea comes from the book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, formerly a quantitative trader, now an author and researcher. Think of “antifragile” and “antifragility” as descriptors of a system that doesn’t break when it experiences stress. Compare this to a “fragile” system, which will. Here are some of the key ideas that make up this concept:
- An antifragile system is made up of fragile parts: When the parts of an overall system break, you gain information that benefits the system as a whole. Think of the evolutionary process. A species can only evolve when its weakest members die off without passing on their genetic code, allowing stronger members to pass it on instead.
- Antifragile systems build up strength after being stressed: A fragile system may not always break after being stressed, but it will buckle. An antifragile one, by contrast, builds up extra capacity for future stress.
- Tranquility creates fragility while volatility builds antifragility: Stress is essential for an antifragile system to thrive. Logically, the absence of stress creates fragile systems that don’t need to react to stress.
- Antifragility depends on managing risks to benefit from volatility: Volatility creates stress, and stress benefits antifragile systems. If you’re looking to turn a fragile system into an antifragile one, you need to carefully manage catastrophic risks so incoming stressors help the system grow instead of collapsing it.
- Understanding an opportunity isn’t as important as seizing it: You don’t need to know everything about a potential opportunity to benefit from it. You just need to know when it’s the right option for you.
At its core, antifragility is about not just resisting stressors that would completely tear down other systems; it’s about using them to your advantage. It’s about growing and evolving as these things happen, rather than decaying.
What is an antifragile business?
An antifragile business takes the concept of antifragility and applies it to its structure, its risk management ethos, and its ability to capitalize on opportunities as they arise. The antifragile business thrives when the headwinds come, rather than faltering the way some of its competitors might.
There may be decreases in revenue, increases in employee turnover, and other dips in the business’s overall trajectory. But the antifragile leader knows the organization will prevail and come out stronger on the other side.
Building an antifragile business means taking the necessary steps to create resilience in all systems. There’s one particular system where most businesses fail to do that.
Their software.
Why software integration is essential for building antifragility
Your organization depends on more tools than ever before — about 371 individual applications, according to some estimates. That in itself is a stressor for your organization. But, like many such stressors, it’s a double-edged sword, rather than just a purely negative situation.
- The positive: The tools you use allow the people in your organization to get more done and do it all more efficiently, usually with less manual work or technical skill. Your teams can do things you once might not have thought possible.
- The negative: The sheer number of tools you’re working with and the amount of data they create is increasingly difficult to manage. People are either switching back and forth between tools or just accepting that they don’t have all the data they need to do their job. And forget about reporting on progress happening in all these tools.
Having too many tools creates chaos throughout the organization. Important data is lost. Top performers waste time sifting through duplicates to find the relevant data they need. Teams struggle to find alignment. Miscommunications potentially completely derail important projects.
A common response to this? Constraint. Instead of three project management tools, the organization cuts down to one — not taking into account how unique features in each tool contribute to the whole. Seats and licenses may be restricted for some tools to prevent too many people from generating data in those tools. But these constraints don’t create an antifragile system; they instead add fragility. Antifragile systems need a certain level of redundancy to manage risks. If any one tool becomes the lynchpin of too many workflows, it’s a single point of failure that can bring entire systems to a screeching halt.
Making your organization’s tool stack antifragile doesn’t mean sacrificing mission-critical tools. By deploying the right software integration, you can get all the upsides of your tool stack without any of the downsides.
And there’s only one solution for doing that.
Why Unito is the ultimate antifragile integration solution
Unito is an integration platform that builds a bridge between some of the most important tools in your stack, from project management tools like Asana and Jira to spreadsheets like Google Sheets, CRMs like HubSpot to form-builders like Jotform. That bridge sends data to and from your tools, turning disparate, fragile tools into an interconnected system that can resist even the biggest stressors.
So why is Unito the right solution?
- It makes the system antifragile, not the parts. An antifragile system is built of fragile parts that bend, break, and are discarded as needed. When your team is too invested in a tool that isn’t working right, moving from that tool to something else is a huge time and resource investment. A Unito integration can keep the data in that tool in multiple other platforms at once, updated in real-time, meaning you’re never overly attached to a single tool.
- Unito makes your tool stack more resilient over time. Most software integration and automation platforms don’t handle any historical data. You can only push data created after you’ve deployed your integration. Unito handles all your historical data, meaning each tool becomes a greater wealth of information as time goes on, instead of forcing teams to figure out where the most up-to-date data is.
- It helps you handle volatility. Whether it’s a single app going down for the day or an organization-wide emergency, a two-way sync solution like Unito allows your tool stack to “spread the load.” Meaning that no matter how volatile things get, your tools will be able to support you through it.
- It’s your biggest risk management ally. Whether you’re using only a few tools after budget constraints or multiple disconnected tools, you’re dealing with a ton of risk. Integrating those tools reduces (and even eliminates) that risk.
- It’s there to help you seize opportunities. When your data is scattered through too many tools, important opportunities fall through the cracks. Integrating your stack with a tool like Unito reveals these opportunities and gives you the ability to capitalize on them.
Want to see how Unito can help your organization be antifragile?