# Collaborative Networks: A Pillar of Digital Transformation
## 6 Resilience and Anti-Fragility  
Contemporary industry environments, as well as society in general, face the challenge of dealing with turbulence and disruptive events that are showing with increasing frequency and potentially having extreme impacts. Such events are the result of the accumulation of a variety of factors, such as economic crises, political instability, terrorism, climate change, changes in regulations, demographic shifts, and immigration, increasing dependency on complex technologies, etc. As [PERSON] mentions [116], we live in the Age of Black Swans, a highly complex world characterized by unexpected events and disruptive impacts. This affects all discussed dimensions of Industry 4.0, requiring innovative approaches and new mechanisms to allow dealing with uncertainty, complexity, and non-linearities. In this context, resilience and anti-fragility are two core characteristics that organizations can try to develop to respond positively to substantial changes in order to survive or even thrive in such a volatile world [85; 116]. Resilience is classically understood as the capability of systems to absorb shocks and, although temporarily changing, recover from those shocks. More recently the concept evolved into the notion of transformative resilience [117], representing systems' ability to reorganize, restructure, reconfigure, and even reinvent in response to disruptions. Anti-fragility refers to the property of systems that absorb shocks and improve afterward [116]. Anti-fragility is thus a highly desirable property, which underlying mechanisms are not yet fully understood, but for which promising examples can already be found [85]. In this changing environment Industry 4.0 organizations need to build up resilience to withstand unpredictable events, remaining sustainable and maintaining their competitive advantage and profitability. Moreover, they should develop anti-fragility in order to improve and explore opportunities in disruptive contexts. The innovation and artificial intelligence principles associated with Industry 4.0 developments, coupled with the different tools and methodologies adopted in the digital transformation should enable organizations to prepare for, resist, and rapidly recover from detrimental impacts of disruptive events. The target environment aimed at should have the potential to embrace stressors and help to reinforce the overall resilience and anti-fragility of organizations through characteristics like self-optimization, and real-time decision-making [118]. Indeed, the development of Industry 4.0 creates the opportunity to further develop resilience/anti-fragility-related **capabilities**. These capabilities are attributes that enable companies and business ecosystems to anticipate potential threats, be prepared for change and unpredictable incidents, mitigate the effects of adverse events, and be able to adapt their behavior following a disturbance. Examples of such relevant capabilities include flexibility, redundancy, agility, visibility, and adaptability. Through proper design principles the ongoing digital transformation needs to aim at engineered systems that can achieve/improve these characteristics to be able to resist change, and autonomously recover from disruptive situations [85; 118]. Table 2 gives examples of these relevant resilience/anti-fragility related capabilities. Furthermore, to help organizations become less vulnerable to unpredictable changes, there is a need to define, at the governance level, adequate **strategies** to cope with disruptions effectively and timely through well-devised activation of existing capabilities. Resilience-focused strategies are those that help a system in recovering from shocks and returning to an acceptable state in the face of disruptions; anti-fragility approaches, on the other hand, are those that contribute to gain the advantage of disorders to improve [85]. Collaboration has been pointed out as one of the most promising strategies to handle disruptive events [68].