With time, all assumptions magnify and amplify; wrong assumptions cascade and blow up.
Disruption is generally neither new nor bad; it is simply accelerating. The world’s fundamental paradigms are increasingly changing.
Disruption creates more choice and opportunities for agency. Maintaining relevance then requires constant redefinition, reframing, ideating, prototyping, and testing of our choices.
Today, we are faced with profound questions on the most fundamental features of our world, about the essence of existence and human life in the not-so-distant future.
Relying on arbitrary assumptions does not help quantify the unquantifiable, nor make the unknowable known.
Relevance is both an antidote to avoid and a method for driving disruption.
Maintaining relevance requires constant redefinition, reframing, ideating, prototyping, and testing of our choices.
Disruption creates more agency, freedom, and choice.
Alignment is an evolutionary process, which involves continuous questioning and searching.
To achieve real innovation, one needs to imagine novel ideas, question assumptions, and offer diverse perspectives. Aligning values while challenging conventional wisdom creates new solutions.
Understanding the nature of change is critical for overcoming resistance.
Ultimately, under the veneer of data-driven assumptions, strategic planning can be arbitrary in our deeply uncertain world.
Disruption 3.0 compounds systemic disruptive effects. As complex environments are hyperconnected, hazards and opportunities interact multiplicatively.
The insights derived from data can be invaluable as a feedback loop to decision-making, but should never be confused with being a proxy for the future, a predictor of the future, nor the future itself.
The world’s consultants spend their time advising on restructuring, optimizing processes and inventories, finding every possible source of cost savings and cost synergies. At the same time, the greatest cost of all is ignored: the cost of assumptions. The cost of relying on assumptions is going through the roof.
Building antifragile foundations is like building an immune system for our lives and projects.