Towards an antifragile South African SME

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: 'In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the thingsyou have long taken for granted. – Bertrand RussellThe contribution of small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to the employment, GDP andother factors that affect poverty and income inequality of South Africa is considerable. SouthAfrican SMEs contribute to the economy despite the fact that 75% of SMEs fail within the first42 months – worse than most other countries. If SMEs can be set up to survive and prosper inthe experienced volatility, economies will prosper.Enterprises are complex adaptive systems where the dynamic constructs of the enterprisecannot be determined to their finest detail. Enterprises can therefore be represented as asystem with subsystems and components which should align functionally in pursuit of thepurpose of the enterprise. These subsystems and components are usually formally defined inlarge corporations, but they often lack that level of definition in SMEs. SMEs require a way inwhich to master the complexity of the enterprise at effective levels.Smaller enterprises respond to volatility in their external- or internal environment, and there isa need to understand the possible responses. These responses can be fragile (reduced invalue/functionality), robust or resilient (maintain value/functionality) or seen to improve invalue/functionality, also now known as 'antifragile'. Antifragile, on the opposite side of thespectrum of fragility, is the system response which improves under volatility. The field ofantifragility is in its infancy and a part of this study sought to find characteristics that enabledantifragility in systems.The objective of this study was to develop a framework that will assist South African SMEs tobe more antifragile. The research was conducted through a constructivist perspective whichsought to better understand phenomena whilst understanding that an absolute answer willmost likely not be found. The research was exploratory in nature, with antifragility beingapproached by evaluating constructs and adapting these constructs to provide a moreinformed and sophisticated theory than those preceding its existence to allow for utilisation inthe real world. The basic systems engineering process was utilised for the exploratory buildingstudy. This resulted in the creation of a set of requirements that needed to be met by the framework, the design of the framework, and verification and validation that the frameworkhad met the requirements.Nine characteristics of antifragility were identified to provide guidelines for explicit antifragileSME design. In order to transform these guidelines to the design of the SME, the systemsengineer is provided with the field of enterprise engineering. Enterprise engineering hasevolved into three schools of thought of which the enterprise-in-environment adaptationschool of thought, focussing on dynamic endo- and exogenous stressors, was chosen as themost representative of antifragile enterprise design.Requirements were gathered from the fields of South African SMEs, antifragility andenterprise-in-environment adaptation and were grouped into five types of categories: 1) userrequirements, 2) functional (essential and desirable) requirements, 3) design restrictions,4) attention points and 5) boundary conditions. These were filtered into groups which play arole in: 1) understanding the current enterprise state, 2) providing an understanding of thefuture enterprise status, and/or 3) those that provide guidance for the transformation fromthe current to the future status. These provided the three distinct phases of the framework.These requirements were further distilled, per phase, into requirements which meet the sameobjective and resulted in nine stages.The three phases with the nine supporting stages resulted in the output, as the objective of thestudy, the Epictetus framework, with each stage providing an objective, requirements, andantifragile considerations to guide the enterprise design decision-making for the SME.The validation was done through 1) a per stage validation, 2) semi-structured interviews thatwere held both locally and internationally, and 3) through an illustrative case study.The study provides explicit characteristics for antifragility, as well as a method in whichantifragility in a system can be assessed. It also provides the clarity of practical steps which canmake antifragility explicit in enterprises and more importantly in South African SMEs. Itprovides a stepping stone from which a better understanding of antifragility can be gained aswell as how it can be used to design systems. It also provides a foundation from which SMEscan be designed to improve under volatility.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University