Is this the right place to have a conversation about what the post-hype market looks like?
I seem to be flying too close to the guarding rails here, and I don’t want to risk being banned for raising ideas.
The current polycrisis and tech disruptions in almost every aspect of our lives have made our world too complex to predict and too fast to adapt to.
Building resilience takes finding and building around structural constraints, unchanging elements that provide the necessary stability.
I like the classic example of Jeff Bezos and Amazon to drive this point home.
When asked what's going to change in the next 10 years, Jeff Bezos said he's hardly ever been asked what isn't going to change. For him, that's the more interesting question, because you can build a strategy around the things that are stable in time.
No matter the state of the economy or the identity of the president, says Bezos, people will want low prices, vast selection, and fast delivery.
When you know something is true even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it. To this day, these three elements make up the core of Amazon's strategy and identity.
Instead of trying to predict what's next or to change faster than the world, Embrace the Unchanging.
But how do you find these unchanging elements?
At any given moment, there is an infinite number of things around you that do not change. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Gravity pulls you towards the Earth. The global population is growing. Unchanging elements are everywhere you look. Most of them are irrelevant and hold no value to you. But a few could be the foundation you build your entire strategy around.
How do you know which elements are right for you? How do you find the enabling constraints that are valuable to you?
The world is too complex to predict and too fast to adapt to. When predictions and adaptation are broken, another strategy is needed to deal with this fast-moving world.
When asked what's going to change in the next 10 years, Jeff Bezos said he's hardly ever been asked what isn't going to change. For him, that's the more interesting question, because you can build a strategy around the things that are stable in time.
No matter the state of the economy or the identity of the president, says Bezos, people will want low prices, vast selection, and fast delivery.
When you know something is true even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it. To this day, these three elements make up the core of Amazon's strategy and identity.
Instead of trying to predict what's next or to change faster than the world, Embrace the Unchanging.
But how do you find these unchanging elements?
At any given moment, there is an infinite number of things around you that do not change. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Gravity pulls you towards the Earth. The global population is growing. Unchanging elements are everywhere you look. Most of them are irrelevant and hold no value to you. But a few could be the foundation you build your entire strategy around.
How do you know which elements are right for you?
By the time you'll adapt to your new reality, the world will change twice over.
For a long time, Jack's quote was spot on. The idea that you have to outchange your environment or die worked.
It doesn't work anymore.
How do you outchange a world that moves faster than you do?
It doesn't mean you shouldn't try. But constantly changing, riding wave after wave, is exhausting and unsustainable. People and organizations can only take so much before being overwhelmed by even faster and bigger changes.
Welch was one of the sharpest business minds of the late 20th century. He perfected the strategy of adapting to change. But it took a sharp mind of the 21st century to answer that question.
For the first time in human history, we have no idea what our world will look like in 20 years.
A thousand years ago, we taught our kids how to shoot a bow or how to pick mushrooms in the forest. A hundred years ago, we encouraged them to become doctors, lawyers, or engineers to make the most of the new world.
The basic stuff of human life was predictable. Not anymore.
Five or six years ago, we had no way to predict that AI would rewrite the rules or that the world would be in disarray, with one crisis hitting after another.
Predictions are broken. We have no way to predict what the world will look like by the end of this decade.
We need a different strategy that doesn't depend on what will change next.
Finding the path forward in this Complex New World means stepping outside what's familiar and seeing reality anew.
The last few years weren't easy. They were overwhelming, turbulent, and scary.
And if that’s not enough, the global crises and technological disruptions aren't going anywhere. This age of rapid change is here to stay.
People and organizations crave certainty. They struggle to find meaning in a world that stopped playing by the rules they grew up with. What used to work no longer does.
The paradox is that while people cling to what feels safe, the answer won't come from what they already know.
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I've been quietly building something new at Positive Constraint. More soon. Stay close 🎉
(I posted this as a comment, but seeing so many similar posts here asking people to share their thoughts on ideas, I thought it'd be valuable as a standalone post with slight adjustments)
Back in 2014-2015, I asked a long-time investor if he liked the startup idea my co-founders and I had just pitched him.
He said, "If Evan Spiegel had pitched Snapchat to me, I'd have him thrown off the stairs. Look where he is now". Snapchat was worth billions back then.
"It doesn't matter what people think of your idea. You're supposed to be the number #1 subject matter expert on all things related to your startup. You should be the one telling me why it's worth the investment, not asking me whether it's worth your time".
So my advice to founders is the same. You need to be the subject-matter expert on all things related to your startup. You need to be the highest authority on the problem, on why your solution is ideal, and whether there's a business case behind it.
Code whatever you want, but do it wisely. Experiment. Remove one risk after another (on that in another post if someone's interested) - will someone pay for it? Can I sell it repeatedly? Will it scale? Build a case whether it's worth your time or not.
It's very likely that no one has gone through this process with this problem/solution before you. This is why random people's advice isn't worth much in that context.
What you can do instead is ask people how painful the problem you're solving is, how they solved it in the past, what time/energy/resources they spent in the last 6 months solving that problem, how they looked for and discovered solutions, and so on.
Map the problem and pain, map the alternatives, and how people solve that pain today. To what extent do they go out of their way to find a solution to that pain? Then, use those insights to build whatever you want to build.
Good luck.