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World Congress 2026 Europe • Jul 9, 2026 • Session details

Beyond Resilience: Architecting Antifragile Systems

Jan de Vries

Is your architecture merely surviving failure, or actually thriving on it? Discover how adopting chaos engineering and decentralized DevOps can transform fragile applications into dynamically evolving, antifragile systems.

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#1 about 3 min

Understanding risk management and the concept of antifragility

Identifying the limitations of preparing for known uncertainties and shifting focus to systems that gain from disorder.

#2 about 2 min

Differentiating fragile, robust, resilient, and antifragile systems

Exploring how fragile architecture breaks under stress while antifragile structures actively learn and grow from unexpected disruptions.

#3 about 3 min

Identifying examples of system resilience and fragility in technology

Recognizing how technical debt weakens systems while methods like chaos engineering deliberately strengthen infrastructure through controlled failure.

#4 about 4 min

Applying non-linearity and asymmetry to software delivery processes

Evaluating how practices like continuous deployment provide outsized gains compared to the rigid coordination found in traditional projects.

#5 about 7 min

Maximizing system optionality through experimentation and via negativa

Eliminating unnecessary complexity and utilizing proper work categorization to reduce technical debt and expand future architectural options.

#6 about 3 min

Building operational accountability by transferring fragility within teams

Dissolving organizational silos and applying skin in the game through decentralized decision-making and cross-functional engineering support models.

#7 about 5 min

Implementing the barbell strategy and focusing on recovery time

Balancing safe investments with speculative initiatives while prioritizing mean time to recovery over mean time between failures.

#8 about 6 min

Reducing organizational debt and leveraging conway's law in engineering

Simplifying hierarchy and processes to align organizational structures with desired software architectures while shifting toward value stream funding.

#9 about 2 min

Establishing psychological safety to encourage continuous system experimentation

Shifting engineering culture to accept controlled failures and view active experimentation as a necessary tool for discovering flaws.

Matching moments

3:23 min

Second-order cultural effects of practicing chaos engineering

Steve Upton Steve Upton · WWC 2022

5:00 min

Navigating complexity and anti-patterns in modern software architecture

Mihaela-Roxana Ghidersa · LIVE

2:01 min

Focusing on core software quality attributes for foundational resilience

Mihaela-Roxana Ghidersa · LIVE

3:46 min

Understanding system resilience and the costs of failure

Mihaela-Roxana Ghidersa · LIVE

2:08 min

Navigating and mitigating the impacts of broken engineering cultures

Oskar Kruschitz Oskar Kruschitz · Europe 2026 Virtual

2:33 min

Leading resilient organizations through periods of fundamental uncertainty

Nazim Unlu Nazim Unlu · WWC 2025

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