Fragile, Robust and Antifragile Services

The contemporary economy, including the service sector, is exposed to strong, violent and unexpected impacts (shocks, crises, challenges, opportunities) of an internal and external nature. The purpose of the paper presented here is to attempt to characterize and classify service activities in the light of Taleb’s concept, who divided all existing real things into three categories: fragile, robust, and antifragile. Each of these types of things react differently to changes, especially those least expected and leading to fundamental changes, called by Taleb “black swans”. The conditions of such changes in relation to the service activities were given. Also were determined general features of consumer, business, and public services according to fragility, robustness and antifragility, as well as some examples of them. The statements contained in the article are hypotheses, but according to the author, sufficiently justified by the current state of knowledge. #0#


Introduction
Service activities form the backbone of the modern world economy, and the majority of employees work in them. In highly developed countries, they form the dominant part of GDP, in less developed they create numerous jobs with higher efficiency than agriculture, fisheries or mining. They also help to improve the quality of life. These activities, strongly diversified, were adopted to be called the tertiary sector, according to the Fisher-Clark concept The Taleb's concept Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2013) divided all existing real things, systems and units into three categories: resistant, fragile and antifragile. This author refers to another own concept of the so-called "black swans", i.e. unpredictable events, initially seemingly insignificant, but causing, after some time, severe disturbances and leading to profound and irreversible changes (Taleb, 2014). The appearance of the "black swan" in the life of some complex thing (ecosystem, person, family, social group, nation, state, economic sector, institution, enterprise, region or city) means that nothing is the same anymore and everything is happening differently. Such events may be positive or negative. Negative "black swans", or "catastrophes" and "unlucky events" can have three different consequences: fragile things undergo devastation and decay, robust ones are able to withstand the shock and without fundamentally changing their structure and operating principles, return to the smooth functioning and development whereas the antifragile things are obviously disturbed, even very severely, but ultimately they emerge from the crisis stronger, better, and more developed. Positive "black swans", or occasions and "won in the lottery" are not used by robust Vol. 28/2, 4/2018 Fragile, Robust and Antifragile Services things, because they often do not see them, disrespect them or are very reluctant to any changes, fragile things are so overwhelmed by the new situation that they are not able to use all the possibilities resulting from them, and the best are the emergence of positive "black swans" antifragile things, which by nature are ready for change, await their great opportunity and constantly hope that they will succeed.
Complex things are not condemned to one type of reaction to crises. It also depends on the type of crisis. In some cases, fragile things can show immunity, and resistant to react like anti-friction. Again an analogy to the health condition of a human being -the resistance to viruses and bacteria can be combined with psychological fragility in difficult situations, and people of poor health may show significant resistance to stress. In general, however, very complex and complex things show a certain integrity, resulting from their structure and the most common ways of acting, and belonging to one of the types from the Taleb's concept is their essential property determining the response to crises.

Sources of crises in the services sector
The sources of sudden and significant challenges for enterprises and their groupings in the services sector may be internal or external. Internal sources are a faulty market strategy, inefficient management and personnel problems. Each of them, and especially together, may be the cause of a serious, most often unexpected crisis. Prevention and counteracting such adverse events is the subject of a separate field of crisis management knowledge and activities (e.g. Baubion, 2013). These types of internal threats concern, in fact, all enterprises, public institutions and social organizations, regardless of the economic sector or the sphere of social activity.
External sources, which are more important, can be divided into natural, social, technological and market ones. Natural disasters are most often unexpected, especially when it comes to them in the same place and time. These types of crises are caused by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, floods, waves of heat, droughts, expansion of alien species of animals and plants, but also epidemics among people and among animals. This is despite technologically advanced monitoring and warning systems against natural disasters and epidemics.
Natural disasters destroy and damage primarily buildings and technical infrastructure. They also lead to financial losses and cause long-lasting psychological and social effects. Of course, they require extraordinary activities of public administration, police, emergency and medical services, and sometimes even army. Service activities, whose operation depends to a large extent on buildings, equipment and technical infrastructure, may react differently, showing fragility, robustness or antifragility. Numerous empirical studies show that local communities, as well as public and private providers of basic services related to people's existence, saving lives and health, securing damages and rebuilding from destruction, show antifragility in such situations.
The strongest social sources of crises in the services sector are international and domestic armed conflicts. Similar negative effects bring revolutions. Also violent, non-military conflicts leading to strikes and street riots. The change in the political system (such as the transformation of the Soviet bloc countries since 1990), resulting in a thorough change in the legal conditions of the functioning of the economy, is the source of numerous challenges for the services sector. As experience indicates, some use them as an opportunity and achieve revenues that are incomparable to the times of peace (e.g. trade of weapons, medicines, sometimes food). However, public services suffer huge losses, even for armed forces and police.

Marek Dutkowski
Economic sources of crises in the services sector are the result of social crises, but often they are the result of rapid changes in economic relations: currency and foreign trade, banking, budget, but also changes in customer preferences and resulting changes in demand. Such crises also create both opportunities and threats.
Technological sources of crises in the services sector result from the emergence or disappearance of technological solutions used by service providers or customers. The emergence of the Internet, smartphones, artificial intelligence, medical therapies and the possibility of modifying the human body has led to the disappearance of certain types of services (e.g. postal services) and the emergence of new ones (e.g. internet commerce).

General features of fragile, robust, and antifragile services
Using the Taleb's concept, one can indicate the features of service activities, which can be attributed to the property of fragility, robustness and antifragility. Such typical features, based on a table published by N.N. Taleb (2013, pp. 48-52) are presented in the Table 1. As already mentioned above, the features of three types of services presented in this table -fragile, robust and antifragile, which also concern other sectors of the economy, have the character of a theoretical and methodological proposal. Only empirical studies of individual companies, their groupings and industries will allow them to assess them. At this stage of application of the Taleb's concept in scientific research they seems to be justified and legitimate. Classification of services according to the criteria of fragility, robustness, and antifragility. The notion of "service activities" could be defined in different ways, depending on the purpose of the research or applications. However, there is a general agreement that services are economic activities aimed at satisfying collective and individual needs without transfer of material goods. They can be classified by to the criterion of their Vol. 28/2, 4/2018 Taleb's concept introduces different criteria for the classification of service activities. Due to the diversity of the frequency of fragile, robust and antifragile services, it is justified, however, to adopt a simple and commonly accepted division of service activities according to the criteria of their recipient on: consumer, business, and public services.
According to these three groups, examples of service activities are classified on the basis of the features presented in Table 1 to be described as fragile, robust or antifragile. The intended scope of this article does not allow for a wider justification of such an assignment, it should be treated as hypothetical, but justified by available knowledge and knowledge of individual cases. The various types of service activities classified according to the Taleb's concept and presented in Table 2 were discussed only in a general way. Source: own study.
Fragile service activities include both numerous consumer and public services. Most of them are large, hierarchical enterprises or their groupings and state institutions, related to internal or external security, media supply, road and rail infrastructure, but also sport, tourism and recreation, but also sexual and porn services. They are sensitive to various types of crises, discussed above. The most dangerous for the entire economy and society is the fragility of financial services for business and individual clients, especially large banks and insurance companies, as evidenced by the events of 2008/2009. Budgetary difficulties also lead to deterioration in the Marek Dutkowski activities of many public services. Long-term political conflicts, especially the break-up and collapse of states, result in the disintegration of the state administration, the police and the armed forces. Of course, the lost war leads to similar effects. Examples of this type of events, however, vary in their range, include Iraq, Somalia, Greece and, more recently, Venezuela.
Robust service activities include not very diverse types of service activities. They are related to the basic needs of people associated with birth, health, education, religious faith, care for children and the elderly and the disabled, saving lives and property and death, but also the needs related to gambling, prostitution and pornography. Robustness exhibits logistics and technical infrastructure management among business services. Of course, various types of crises may lead to a deterioration of the quality or limitation of the offer, but historical experience indicates that even gambling and prostitution are permanent elements of numerous, though not all, civilizations. People are born, get sick, grow old and die, which causes demand for certain services. Both in exclusive neighborhoods and in the slums. Both in Kuwait and South Sudan.
The most interesting in the context of the Taleb's concept are the antifragile service activities. These include, above all, services related to satisfying the above-basic needs of people, are subject to rapid technological and cultural changes and influences of fashion, media and trendsetters: home maintenance and repairs, cleaning, repair of cars and other equipment, delivery services to home, transport of people, provision of information (currently implemented mainly via the Internet), beauty services (including plastic surgery). Among the antifragile business services are accounting, secretarial and information services. An important type of antifragile services is any artistic activity, from composing operas and writing novels to street dance and graffiti makers. The success in all these activities results not only from talent and diligence, but often also from happy coincidences and the whims of consumers of artistic activity. The most diverse antifragile services, however, are located in retail and cateringfrom the offering of a few bananas or a bowl of cooked rice traders in the slums of African cities to luxury department stores and boutiques as well as restaurants and cafes of New York, Paris, London or Tokyo and the Wal-Mart or Amazon network as well.

Conclusions
The Taleb's concept is an interesting starting point for a different view of the services sector from the previous view. If you accept the division of service activities as useful, it opens up a new research perspective of managing services and providing services fragile and robust to antifragile.