Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s extensive psychological treatise on antifragility (things that gain from disorder) offers humans, not least Human Resource personnel, the opportunity to look at life from a different perspective-one of embracing and thriving in uncertainty and randomness.

We are so used to coming into the office at a set time, on set days, doing set tasks to attain measurable objectives that eventually we can start to become irritated when things go wrong – the email system going down, a fire drill we had forgotten about, and spilling coffee on our paperwork, etc.

According to Taleb, we need to learn – or relearn – how to adapt creatively to random events. [...]

Most business professionals rely on return on investment (ROI) as a measure of successful business decisions. However, Kearn’s suggests that it is not Return on Investment (ROI) we should concern ourselves with initially, it is value added that is specific to a particular organization that needs to be identified early by managers (2005). Although the following is not specifically targeted for the brewing industry, it is relevant in a conceptual nature.

Evaluation Versus Value Added

According to Kearn’s, Kirkpatrick’s four-level evaluation model suggests that evaluation takes place after training at which point the [...]