In the second installation of New Media Mondays, the focus was on how we can manage and plan around chaos to get the most out of our professional lives. Based Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book “Anti-Fragile: Things That Gain From Disorder”, each speaker looked at how they used uncertainty, failure and disorder to their professional and personal advantage.
New Media Mondays is a quarterly series of free discussions and workshops that aims to build more collaborative competitiveness between businesses in the Woodstock and surrounds. The workshop was hosted for the second time at Priest’s headquarters in Woodstock, Cape Town.
The speakers included Brad Whittington (CTO of Mixit), Annette Muller (Founder and CTO of DotNXT) and Paul Cartmel (Founder and MD of New Media Labs).
Whittington opened the evening by likening the ephermeral world upheld in Buddist philosophy to the scientific understanding that systems tend toward chaos. As a business owner and parent, Whittington believed that anti-fragility is accepting the inevitability of change and building processes and systems that learned how to embrace it.
“Go out and be dangerous, because that is how you are going to do amazing things,” Whittington ended, to great approval and praise from the crowd.
Cartmel based his discussion on luck probability (“I believe in luck but I believe more in probability”) and discussed how, despite rigorous planning for success, the biggest failures in his company turned out to lead to larger successes.
Muller adopted a human-centric approach and referred to Thomas L. Friedman’s “The World is Flat” that peaked her interest in the Individual. As a business owner, she had to learn and adapt to the nature of the individual, that is both fearful and creative. Her position as a business women is to encourage her staff to overcome their fears and adopt a positive, proactive attitude to their work.
The third edition of New Media Mondays will happen in early 2015. Watch this space!
