“The anti-fragile culture” by lincolnq

How to prevent infighting, mitigate status races, and keep your people focused. Cross-posted from my Substack.

Organizational culture changes rapidly at scale. When you add new people to an org, they’ll bring in their own priors about how to operate, how to communicate, and what sort of behavior is looked-up to. Despite rapid changes, in this post I explain how you can implement anti-fragile cultural principles—principles that help your team fix their own problems, often arising from growth and scale, and help the org continue to do what made it successful in the first place.

This is based partially on my experience at Wave, which grew to 2000+ people, but also tons of other reading (top recommendations: Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister, Swarmwise by Rick Falkvinge, High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil, The Secret of Our Success by Henrich, Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, as well as Brian [...]

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Outline:

(01:13) Common Problems

(05:00) Write down your culture

(06:25) That said, you don't have to write everything down

(08:37) Anti-fragile values I recommend

(09:02) Mission First

(10:51) Focus

(11:32) Fire Fast

(12:58) Feedback for everything

(13:50) Mutual Trust

(15:48) Work sustainably and avoid burnout

(17:42) Write only what's new & helpful

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First published:
August 21st, 2025

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mLonxtAiuvvkjXiwq/the-anti-fragile-culture

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.