Lately, I’ve been thinking about something that surprised me. Not a new strategy. Not a new tool. Not even a breakthrough in execution. A shift in how I interpret stress. It started during a season when we were pushing hard, building quickly, moving fast, and asking more of the system and the team than we ever had before. From the outside, it looked like progress. But inside, things didn’t feel smooth. Small issues started to surface. A process that used to work began to strain. A handoff that used to be clean became messy. People started to feel stretched. The edges started to show. And I remember thinking, “Is something wrong?”
That’s the reflex most leaders have. When cracks appear, we assume failure is close behind. When something starts to break, we think we made a mistake. So my first instinct was to tighten everything. Fix it immediately. Patch the cracks. Reduce the pressure. Bring things back under control. We confuse strain with dysfunction. Leaders are trained to associate smoothness with health. Stress feels like danger. The natural reaction is to protect, to stabilize, to return to what felt safe.
But then I paused. And I realized something deeper: Nothing was breaking because we were careless. Things were breaking because we were growing. We had pushed the system to a new level of demand, and it was responding only the way organic things respond under pressure. Not with perfection. With adaptation. The cracks weren’t proof that something was wrong. They were proof that something real was happening. We weren’t watching the collapse. We were watching construction.
That’s when I started thinking about nature. Muscle doesn’t grow without tearing. Bones don’t strengthen without load. Trees don’t develop deep roots without wind. And in the same way, teams don’t become strong without strain. Organizations don’t mature without pressure revealing what’s weak. Nothing in nature becomes strong without being tested. Organic systems don’t grow in comfort. They grow through resistance.
This is the idea of antifragility. Some things don’t just survive stress. They improve because of it. Fragile things break under pressure. Resilient things endure it. But antifragile things become stronger because of it. The goal isn’t to build a business that never feels pressure. The goal is to build one that becomes stronger through it. Because if everything always looks fine, you may not be building strength at all. You may be operating in conditions that are too soft to demand anything deeper.
That moment changed something for me. I stopped seeing stress as a sign of failure. And started seeing it as a sign that we were finally doing work heavy enough to matter. When pressure rises, weaknesses surface. Bottlenecks appear. People feel stretched. Systems show cracks. Leaders must learn to ask: Is this a sign of mismanagement? Or simply the cost of scaling? Stress is often the tuition you pay for growth.
There is a danger in the opposite direction. When nothing is breaking, it might mean you’re not pushing hard enough. The roots remain shallow. The organization stays untested. Comfort can hide fragility. Smoothness is not always strength. Sometimes it’s softness. If your team never feels the weight of real demand, you may be protecting them from the very thing that would make them capable.
The art is in the balance. Antifragility is not chaos. Pressure must be applied wisely. Recovery matters. Leaders must push without destroying. Stress plus recovery equals growth. You push to the edge, not past it. You let the system strain, then you give it time to adapt. You watch for the signs that tell you whether the team is building muscle or tearing ligaments. The difference is real, and it requires attention.
So here is what I practice now. When I see strain, I pause before I react. I ask whether this is a sign of something broken or something forming. I look for patterns. Is the same problem repeating because we ignored it, or is it new because we are in new territory? I give the team space to solve it before I step in. I protect the recovery time as fiercely as I protect the work time. And I remind myself that the cracks are not always the beginning of collapse. They are often the beginning of strength.
In business, the early signs of strain are not necessarily warnings that something is wrong. They are often signals that something real is being built. Antifragile organizations don’t fear pressure. They use it. The leader’s job is not to eliminate stress, but to guide the team through it, allowing the cracks of growth to become the foundations of strength.
Sometimes the breaking points aren’t failure. There may be evidence of progress. Strong organizations are forged, not protected. Don’t fear the cracks. Learn from them. Let them shape something stronger. The work is not to avoid the strain. The work is to move through it and come out the other side more capable than before.
