I first used the illustration to the left last November when I was updating the whole Flexuous Curves Framework (FCF). I don’t intend to repeat the material of that earlier post or to be completely consistent with it, but I recommend a quick skim before proceeding. This used to be known as the Apex Predator Curve but I realised that the Apex idea was just one aspect of a wider re-wilding idea; where I have yet to write part 2 of my initial post last January. This wider concept needs a different name. It is not finally settled yet, but it has the quality of being both familiar and different; that means you can sense the meaning but not abscond with it to some more common use of language. Overall this framework is as important to the field of naturalising sense-making as Cynefin and it is also fractal in nature, it can apply to whole markets, individual product/service strategies, or the wider movement of ideas or tropes in society as a whole. As most people are aware this is the point where the body of my work interacts with that of Wardley Maps and it is both similar and different. So while it is my theory, it also is a synthesis of the work of Moore and others, all identified in the earlier posts.
In today’s post I want to look at a strategic switch in thinking in the context of a wider market, rather than an individual product, although there is considerable overlap between. This is highly relevant to a lot of work on citizen engagement, rethinking the economy as well as business change. Covid is the sort of radical disruption that means space is emerging for new apex predators as the old are often ill-adapted for a new and uncertain context. That admonition applies to Cognitive Edge as well and you will see changes in how we present and engage.
In this post, I want to focus on the Gamma-Omega move and the changes that are required at that point. Remember that the Alpha and Beta points are all about ambiguity, early adopters creating something with exciting capabilities. Here it is important to co-evolve your idea with the market and the pressure of having to sell the idea is a critical part of the overall resilience downstream. It is why I have argued that venture capital should focus in scaling post Beta, rather than, through funding, removing that evolutionary pressure. As you enter the Beta point you are increasingly able to codify at a level of abstraction which opens up the possibility of scaling but you are still selling to people who are interesting in how you do things, less than what it will do for them.
The main danger here is homogenisation with the familiar. I’ve been there many times with something novel but it seems similar to an existing and established approach. This is especially true at stage 4 on the map where inattentional blindness means that the established way of doing things is difficult to challenge. Here create boundaries and making distinctions a little more extreme than you would like is key. I am of course assuming that what you have here is truly different. Distinctiveness is key both to attract those early buyers and to maintain a level of control over the process of codification and abstraction to allow for later scaling. The last thing you want at this stage is to appear ordinary or similar and you are going to have to prepared to upset a few people. Often people will have invested the better part of their lives in a way of thinking and making sense of the world and novelty will always disturb the established order. Maintaining the balance between challenging orthodoxy and being downright obnoxious is not an easy one to maintain but this is the time to do it. Indirect approaches which complement existing methods (even though they are likely to replace them) are one proven pathway as is symbiosis, adding the capability to existing practice knowing that ultimately the new thing will replace the old over time. You have a limited market for novelty so you can afford to keep control, to preserve the purity of what you are doing.
But when you hit the gamma point everything changes. The overall eco-system is ready for change as the utility of the older idea is coming to an end and it is moving to a decline. What matters now is the rapid diffusion of the idea and you need to lead but not control. Boisot’s seminal work with the I-Space pointed to the need for high levels of abstraction and codification to allow diffusion. So while at the Alpha/Beta point novelty was a competitive advantage, often requiring deep knowledge and experience, you are now at a point where if you don’t codify fast at a level of abstraction that allows for early adoption someone else will do it for you. Speed is key and (and this is the most difficult) you can’t do this gradually or experimentally, you have to commit. If you have got the Alpha-Beta work right then people are now looking and paying attention to you, not any direct competitor. Being attacked is one of the weak signals that you are making people nervous and to a degree, you should be more reasonable. Accept the value of what has worked in the past, but point out that life changes, and sometimes you move on, ideally in parallel for a period. A both/and strategy is now called for and if you have done some anticipatory thinking you won’t have closed all avenues to this during the alpha-beta stage of differentiation and boundary control and patrol!
So you switch from containing the connecting, from controlling to being an attractor around which other actors can cluster and imitate. No market grows if you maintain a monopoly. This is where open source strategies come into their own, remove the barriers for adoption, but make adoption if your approach as easy as possible so that you lead the development. This is also where pricing strategies are key. You are not yet at the point where there are budgets allocated for your approach, your danger is substitution, not competition. So you can’t dictate terms, especially with partners who can command access to key decision-makers. Being open, being easy to work with is key and hard bake your purity into your offering through better and more attractive codification. The metaphor of geese in the banner picture illustrates this point and the way the flock develops and handles leadership is something worth thinking about.
Your strategy is to exit the Omega point with a growth trajectory and to maintain leadership. Depending on whose work you look at this stage is about 13½% of the total market and who even ends up as the Apex Predator at this point dominates the final and most profitable stages – get to that point and you can start to dictate terms but not before.
I’m conscious this post assumes a lot of prior knowledge and it is also laying down a pattern that I will build on in subsequent posts and also various work we are doing in the wider field of naturalising sense-making and anthro-complexity that I talked about in yesterday’s post. At the moment, as an organisation we are trying to work out how to eat our own dog food as the saying goes, so watch this space.
Banner picture of geese is cropped from an original ‘Foggy Winter Day at the Lake’ by Charles Jackson on Unsplash
I have been very busy with the above-mentioned wiki and other matters so the blog has been neglected. I will be posting (and retrofitting) the annual Cynefin update shortly and will reference that on social media. But I don’t want that to inhibit getting some key material out there now
In my earlier post on focus I identified the need to shift from the alpha to the omega points in the Ystwyth curve by going through four stages along with five types of premature convergence. While I have put a lot of structure in here, it is more a scaffold around which emergence will happen and there is a balancing act between keeping you options open and missing the boat. The key to managing uncertainty is to break any linear concept and encourage co-evolution or praxis, as they interact with experimental practice. The issue is to maintain parallelism of the experimental process (this is after all complex) while ensuring the energy cost is containable. I’ve lived through this a lot over the years when I’ve been juggling several balls to see what will work. The phrase Can’t you just pick one and focus on it always fills me with dread, in part because it is correct in some contexts while being catastrophic in others. I’ve often used the parable of the sower to make the point: the seed is cheap, watch to see where it sprouts. The problem is that a lot of people find juggling difficult. An element of this is the generalist v specialist thing and if you are generalists you just have to be comfortable with glimpsing the greater depths of a specialist while gaining comfort for being able to see the wider landscape.
Some of this links to the wider question of how sound your knowledge is. In general, the more you know, or the more you know how to acquire knowledge, the more comfortable you are with ambiguity and the more uncomfortable people around you get! That discomfort results in one of the premature convergence types I outlined last time. Last time I said understanding of the granularity and distributed ownership was important here, but to that, I want to add understanding of the process and agreement as to where things are. One of the major functions of sense-making frameworks, in general, is to provide structure. Cynefin allows me to say We agreed if it was complex, then we would carry out parallel safe-to-fail experiments rather than having to debate afresh each time. So one purpose of identifying the four stages is to allow consensus and agreement as to where the matter is, who owns it and who needs to be involved. I now want to view those stages (and by implication the delta point) through the lens of structure and transparency.
It should be clear, to the discerning reader, that am currently in the beta phase of this particular enterprise. So consider the diagram to the right an exploratory one! The vertical dimension is in effect the level of granularity or coherence. in the early stages, it may just be a glint in the eye of its creator or a conversation with a client that leads to exploration. The level of abstraction is high so codification and diffusion are difficult and not desirable anyway. The idea has to mull around for a bit. Often when you talk to inventors the origin may be a previous failure, by the way, it is after all where most learning happens. As the idea starts to form you talk about it with more people, maybe build a prototype, or start to talk about it in the context of needs. More structure is starting to come into play and as you move from alpha to beta this becomes an inflection point and while participation remains tight (only those trusted) the wider pattern is starting to emerge and some key elements will stabilise. As this happens more and more you need to pause the codification, too few people involved. So in the gamma stage, you start to test the ideas out, broaden the group while holding the level of structure of codification to the minimum necessary. Even when you have clearly defined elements you avoid a rigid definition of interactions at all cost. Historically, from my perspective having built three software businesses over the years, this is where you start to make sales. A golden heuristic is that if no one is ready to buy it, you ain’t got it right, there are always people prepared to play with a novel idea – not many but a bright light attracts them like months. The last thing you want is venture capital at this point as it will involve hubris on behave of the inventor – you need the harshness of real projects with real clients badly.
This is also when you are the most in danger of premature convergence. You are starting to consume resources and that means your activities come under more scrutiny. The danger is that you will be forced to create a final offering, or someone else internal or external will act before you are ready to. I’ve shown that as the delta point although you have to see the picture in three dimensions to relate that back to the original Ystwyth curves. So as you open up, the structure starts to stabilise and then you take off. If you look at the line there are two periods where you engage more people without increasing codification and two where you keep the base of those involved the same while focusing on codification.
So next time someone asks you to get more focus ask them on what …
PS: I will be returning to this and the earlier posts – possibly as a booklet or method sheet later this year or early next, and there will be some more blog posts before I get to that point. Tomorrow I want to move onto diversity and inclusion and how we manage that from an anthropological-complexity perspective.
Opening focus image is by redcharlie and the banner picture of shattered glass is by Batuhan Doğan both on Unsplash
This post (which will be several parts) is an extension of my posts on contextual strategy that started with a post updating my Apex Predator theory entitled Flexuosity untangled which continued on the next two days with The Ystwyth-curve and then Flexuous landscapes. In it I want to address the perennial problem of focus and I will draw on my reflective experience from being in charge of forward strategy in a medium-size services company, before working within strategy in IBM and then the company, Cognitive Edge that I founded with Steve some 15 years ago. So Medium, Large, Small and what is fascinating is that the problems are very similar, how do you translate ideas into scalable business or (in an NFP) impact, and front and central to that is the question of focus; you have limited resource where do you apply it. As a full declaration here, I don’t claim any special omniscience here, I’ve had my failures. Like any innovator, I know that they would have been fewer if people had just listened to me more, but the theorist in me says that they probably shouldn’t listen too hard!
In this post I want to argue that understanding where we are in the Ystwyth cycle (I’m probing here to see if the welsh takes off or not) gives more coherence to this decision. A lot of this relates to the last post on Landscapes and the idea of scale and perspective but I now want to develop that further. But as is my wont, let me start with a discursive to set the context. You have limited energy and you have to choose where you spend it. You also have key decisions to make on the level of abstraction and codification that an idea will sustain in there here and now and the adjacent future plausibilities (key phrase there and I will return to it this week). The balance of abstraction and codification to allow diffusion of ideas is central to Boisot’s work in Knowledge Assets and you might also want to check out my post last April on Narrative as abductive acts of knowing as I will be referencing some of the ideas there in this post. If I look at Agile, the current buzz word, it starts in software development with origins in XP, Scrum, and DSDM. XP is a low abstraction, low codification but authentic too, and largely drives the Agile manifesto. DSDM (and I was one of the founder-sponsors of that back in DataSciences days) was abstract and codified but an assembly of methods and tools that required expertise to piece together. Scrum was becoming increasingly abstract, codified, and focused as well as being fairly new and if you look at this history of Agile its sudden growth and adoption is critical to the diffusion power of Scrum.
It is worth remembering that any novel approach will be a fluid mixture of methods, ideas, concepts, constraints, tools and so on which is gradually in the process of coalescence. The overall shift is from complex to complicated in Cynefin terms, has high path dependency; so you need to be paranoid in the early stages as decisions then will have profound implications for what happens next. Granularity therefore matters. In the description below I was going to use components for lack of a better word but that has a reductionist flavour to it, so I am going to use elements instead.
Now Agile is a good example of this but the issue or problem is a lot wider and applies to any idea or service proposition. A hard product is different and there is often an issue with taking developments in one and applying them to the other. It is similar to the issue where many methods that emerged from manufacturing (a closed system) were then shifted into service (an open system) with catastrophic effects. 
The safest approach is its one that makes the shift in a safe-to-fail manner through four stages per the Ystwyth Curve:
Now the problem is that this is rarely followed through for various reasons that I collectively call, with innuendo intentional, premature convergence. The beta stage here is key and it is generally where most things go wrong. There are various types of this, and I’ll use metaphors to illustrate what is an incomplete list
Now you can probably think of more but the point of all of these is that they can achieve temporary results but sustainability and diffusion over time become problematic. At best you will become a fad and attract potentially bigger vultures to the scene (SAFe to Scrum for example), at worst a form of gaslighting takes place in which the originator or original idea comes to believe in their subservient role. You end up at the delta point.
Understanding granularity and the level of distributed ownership is key to all these stages and I am going to expand on this in future posts
The Spiders Web used in the banner picture is by Nathan Dumlao and the ‘focus’ picture which opens this post is by Paul Skorupskas both on Unsplash
Yesterday’s post took around 18 hours of elapsed time interspersed by a dashed visit to the shops and two hours of much-needed sleep on the sofa in the Living room after lunch and the odd interaction on LinkedIn with someone who thinks there is nothing in Complex Adaptive Systems theory as everything is encompassed by 1st order Cybernetics. It was a good illustration of the way ideas dominate. One point I made in that exchange is that when I was studying Geology at school back in the early 1970s Continental Drift was still (amazingly) considered controversial. Now the fact that this was plain stupid in the face of evidence which had been around for the best part of a century did not mean that the opposition were bad Geologists or that the bulk of their work had no value. I’ve always found it curious that if you say CAS is not the same thing as Cybernetics and Cynefin demonstrates where that type of approach has utility, it is taken as an attack. The desire for a mono-ontological universal is a form of perversion but it is understandable if you have invested your life in one theoretical framework.
Such an intensive period of work means that you inevitably miss some things and I was using the blog, as I often do, to explore ideas that either I or co-authors can pick up and structure. I think the blog post is my natural medium, the right length, and also permits anecdotal material to set the context and also to engage an audience. Also when you get something out there you get questions and comments that allow you to expand your thinking. So today’s post is designed to supplement yesterdays and I am writing it in fits and starts while writing up our knowledge and decision mapping process in parallel: the third pillar of strategy as per my post yesterday. I finished yesterday’s post with Wotan leading the Gods over the Rainbow Bridge to Valhalla and today I started writing to Walküre and will probably post this as Wotan invokes Loge to create a circle of perpetual fire to protect his daughter from all but the bravest of heroes. Before that, we have the reconciliation motif that links Sieglinde’s sacrifice to that of Brünhilde in the final act of Götterdämmerung where it is next used. No apology as I am suffering withdrawal symptoms with both Longborough and Paris Ring Cycles canceled this year, and someone wanted me to record what I am listening to when I write so I may make that a part of the acknowledgments section of the blog going forwards.
As it happens I was reading the December issue of The Great Outdoors this morning, I won’t say where, and had got to an interesting article on backpacking in the Assynt area of Scotland and came across an interesting quote relevant to this subject
Dear Oh Deer
Fencing for deer is a hot topic in the Assynt area at the moment, as there are plans afoot for a 12-mile enclosure to protect pockets of native woodland around Eisg Brachaidh, just south of Inverkeraig. Much of Assynt sits in a National Scenic Area and the new fencing will have a visual impact from the mountain tops. Paddlers and anglers also have concerns regarding access to the lochs.
On the other side of the (ahem) fence, its worth noting that the deer population of Scotland is said to exceed the carrying capacity of the land by a minimum of 10-12 times (60,000 is reckoned by some to be the upland’s limit without overgrazing 0 the country has in the region of 750,000-1 million). Meanwhile, Scotland has only 4-6% of its native woodland cover left. Large estates and valued by the number of deer they hold, and there is no statutory control over numbers – only voluntary ’agreements’. This has led to the complex and political situation we have now, and as such, you can expect to hear strong opinions voiced oral sides.
I have quoted this in full as there are a series of valuable lessons we can draw from this which further illustrate the value of the ystwyth-curves as a sense-making device. Remember I define sense-making as How do we make sense of the world so that we can act in it. In order to do that in a complex world we need to create ways to frame the problem that reduces error and enables action. So lets spin some of these out:
One point raised on yesterday’s post is that if the vertical dimension is market awareness or size then Green ➊ should be under the Redline. Now that is true but not the intent (and it would look ugly anyway! The point is that green is now aware of red and vice versa until they intersect for the first time, and when the intersection is past it is all over. I’m not sure how to represent that and keep to the back of the napkin test but it may well be that a three-D or similar simulation is the way forward. Sue who did such a great job on the Cynefin Book may have some ideas here.
But if you want an interesting and troubling image, think of multiple patterns of red, green, and many other colours, at various levels of granularity in a fluid space in which interaction creates temporary stabilities. That I really want to visualise and it links to what I intend to say about attractor basins and perception tomorrow.
This has long been a theme of my understanding of how we manege in a complex space or spaces. Human beings are actually quite good at seeing unusual patterns but only if they are first triggered. Think of the children’s puzzle book where you are shown a line drawing of a public park and told that hidden in the drawing are twelve kitchen utensils. Because you know there are anomalies you pay attention and find them. Boundary crossing works the same way, the rituals sitting on the boot of the car getting togged up for walking in winter conditions and the various physical checkpoints are a form of cognitive activation which means I perceive the world differently. A lot of our DARPA work was creating training datasets using SenseMaker® that would trigger alerts when a phase shift was likely and that remains a feature of SenseMaker® use in decision support. I’m starting to think of seeking investment to build libraries of these things so if anyone is interesting get in touch, it is time to shift that material along the curve a bit (I do eat my own dog food).
There is a lot more to come here and there will be other posts but Wotan has moved from punishment to protection and tears are starting to form in my eyes and my heart is in my throat, so I need to complete and post this. One final point, Vlad Stefan Lichtenthal commented on yesterday’s post saying “The “ystwyth-curve”, part of the reason why “History never repeats itself but it rhymes,” (Mark Twain)”. I love that and it inspired me to use the welsh name for today’s post.
Opening picture, a shallow focus take on barbed wire by Linz Franciz from Pexels
The banner picture shows Tryfan and the Carneddau emerging from the cloud on the descent from Moel Siabod from one of my “three doctors’ walks back in October 2018. The day started well with clear skies and even encouraged Dai Lazarus (yes that is his name and yes he is a Doctor) to wild swimming while the rest of us were huddled in full winter’s gear. Cloud set in as we started the scramble up Daear Ddu and we could see more than a few feet in front until the moment I took this picture. On another day, with Chris returning from a session in Bangor, we had some of the most spectacular views I have ever seen from that well-situated summit.
I’ve always been fond of wolves, something that is probably due to a childhood spent with Kipling’s Jungle Book and the Just So Stories. I’m still proud of the Leaping Wolf Badge I obtained as a cub scout, although reading the link I think standards have dropped over the last few decades! So its no surprise that a How Wolves Change Rivers link on social media attracted my attention, as did more detailed scientific papers as I started to play with a new idea for understanding the strategic context in which novelty is possible some years ago. My management career and master’s thesis were dominated by thinkers such as Michael Porter mitigated by the more human orientation of Henri Mintzberg. The former and most of its many derivatives were wrapt up in the engineering metaphors which were starting to dominate the period all of which assumed a context-free approach to strategy. This really started around four years ago when I recounted my work in Data Sciences in creating the Genus programme utilising Moore’s idea of Crossing the Chasm to allow context-specific understanding of both service offerings and sales strategy.
In short, I have been looking to develop an approach to strategy that is more based on geomorphology and bio-diversity. In that first post, I introduced the idea of a flexuous curve to describe the form of what I was developing. I suggested then that a name for this might be the F-Curve but then started to use the idea of an Apex Predator in most presentations. I’ve been concerned about that title for some time given some ill-considered antagonism to the ‘Predator’ word, and the fact that there are many legitimate strategies with different biological metaphors. So as of this morning, while I thought about context framing I’m running with Flexuosity for the moment. Both flexuous and agile translate as ystwyth in Welsh and there are links to cyd-destun. I think we could teach people to pronounce those but I wouldn’t mind a native speaker clipping in here as I may be out of my depth on the meaning.
Now the idea has developed, as ideas do, through a mixture of reading, conversation, and presentation over the years. I still have some more work to do here, in particular going back to a bunch of notes from HTLGI sessions with biologists over the years and the like. The F-Curve/Flexuosity/Apex idea is roughly in the same state as Cynefin was before I got the liminal and aporetic aspects sorted out. It is there, it can be (and has been) used to effect but it continues to evolve as I start to sort out various ambiguities and possibilities. It is potentially as important as Cynefin considered as a sense-making framework; if nothing else it passes the napkin test. Along with Knowledge/Decision mapping and Cynefin, it forms the backbone of a wider approach to strategy which is probably my major focus at the moment.
I’ve moved away from using Moore other than by way of setting context and market life cycle curves in general. There are all variants of a linear process, a quasi-deterministic idea that moves from introduction, though growth, maturity and saturation leading to decline. I’ve used Innovators~Early adopters~Early majority~Late majority~ Laggards with the various percentages over the years although I normally combine the first two and change the percentages a bit, based on that prior DataSciences work. There remains some correspondence but I am not really interested in a product life cycle per se here, other than as something which inherits from a wider market positioning. I am also wrapping the concept into my growing understanding of the triangulation between assemblage theory, narrative tropes, and strange attractors and work on anticipatory triggers and also, at the more abstract, questions of identity as a mutable concept in a flow of meaning over time. All of that is very exciting, especially for an understanding of politics, and is a working up of an idea I got from Constructor Theory in Physics for those interested in being a part of this exploration, I doubt it is something I can do on my own especially some of the work on sorting out the biological metaphors. There is a lot more to do on the theoretical aspects of this that will translate into extended and more coherent practice. At a more prosaic level, there is some work to map (sic) this to Wardley Maps along with Cynefin. But all of that aside the framework works and the explanation is coherent enough to have utility and move into wider adoption. So the rest of this post will summarise what it is, and what it means. It is also the first time out for this version which has more stages than on previous explanations.
A bit tongue in cheek with that heading! I’m using a propositional form rather than a full narrative to layout a basic scaffolding onto which I can build as I develop this and it will transfer to the wiki shortly as it is now ready for other people to use and contribute.
When a pack of wolves was reintroduced to Yellowstone it restored an Apex Predator to the eco-system. The impact on the un-predated deer population both reducing their numbers but also changing behaviour. River Banks were areas of threat therefore less likely to be grazed, vegetation thus flourished, bank erosion decreased and the waters ran clear. This idea is also known as re-wilding which is not a restoration of a past state, but a restoration of sufficient diversity to allow the system to continue to evolve in a sustainable way. If you removed a Keystone Species such as the beaver then you would not have beaver dams, while species would die out and you would get downstream flooding. The entangled and extended nature of fungi both provide nutrients to plants and we can make a metaphorical link to the role of social media here. I am seeking a collective name for this but I am working with Connective Agency for the moment. If you lose your hyenas, vultures, and the like then the Scavenger function is lost. Without dung beetles and other Waste Processors then life gets messy. I could go on but the point is that there are a number of roles in any healthy system and they all have their commercial and political equivalents.
The need for diversity is key here and that diversity creates interdependency. So if I get a major shift in the geomorphology (the meteor hitting the earth) then the whole complex set of dependencies in which the Dinosaurs occupy the various ecological niches are destroyed and a new pattern emerges. The morganucodontids who had lived, literally in the shadow of the dinosaurs, then emerge as the more energy efficient, and all living mammals today trace their ancestors back to them. Exactly what will emerge from such an event is almost impossible to predict but we can identify some of it characterises and energy efficiency and lack of dependency of a single source and without the need for the various complex interdependencies that sustain those creatures higher up in the food chain.
The framework draws on those examples both literally and metaphorically. It is concerned with what we might call underlying ideation patterns, ways of thinking about the world which then manifests in politics and products alike. There are clear aspects of Hegelian dialectical thinking here as well by the way which I acknowledge.
My original insight here was to realise that the cycles overlap. I also realised that I had found the theoretical framing to better understand Clayton Christensen’s case-based development of his ideas around disruptive innovation, and that theory gives better contextual understanding. One of the reasons for Moore’s chasm is that the novel idea or product, seeking to scale, now hits the inertia surrounding the dominant approach. If I do what everyone else is doing there is little risk, if do something novel and it doesn’t work I am in trouble. Risk is key to understanding the nature of behaviour in any liminal state. I also realised that the entry into and exit from the liminal state represent bifurcation points from which there is no return. The exit point marked as on the framework is the point of what Clayton called competence induced failure. The dominant player does not fail because they were incompetent, but because they were too competent in the old paradigm and that very competence means the inattentional blindness is writ large into the very fabric of the organisation.
The entry is a more gradual process and I have identified three phases here which I will talk about in reverse order:
The overall goal is of course to hit the omega point with resources transferring from the old to the new, the upwards curve. But if you don’t take action until after the gamma stage it may be too late and you end up in free fall. Some organisations manage to recover, they arrest failure and recover but never with the same level of dominance, I have labeled this as the delta moment and from it we get two new phases in the cycle. Number 5 is oblivion, a fond memory at best, number 6 is sustainable and you live to fight another day but it will take the significant distraction of the overall eco-system for you to gain a new opportunity.
My former employer IBM provides a good illustrative case here. In the early days of computing, they radically repurposed their existing capability in the use of punch cards to give them a first-mover advantage in a new field whose full potential was yet to be disclosed. But their dominance of hardware meant they didn’t see the shift to software, something made worse by the commodification of the hardware market, but their dominance of the market meant they escaped the price pressure of other competitions so when the failure hit it was massive, a sudden catastrophic failure. They recovered, they had their delta pivot by becoming a services company but have not recovered the same position of dominance. Interestingly they also had a gamma phase in which they realised that people actually wanted to buy PCs, not mainframes and famously gave a team more or less total autonomy and lots of funds to create the IBM PC which, despite being functionally poor compared to its competition, dominated the space. The great irony here is that to achieve they sub-contracted key software development and didn’t realise the value of the IP and thus gave birth to their successor as Apex Predator in the technology space namely Microsoft. Then of course in their turn Microsoft failed to realise that software was a commodity, Apple repurposed NeXT and the rest is history.
Another name for the Omega point is Kodak Moment. Remember that Kodak invited the digital camera but didn’t see the degree to which it would disrupt the market, and they were making too much money anyway through their dominance of a more chemical approach! I remember doing some strategy work for them at the time and it was obvious to any third party that the whole eco-system was shifting but the change was simply a step too far. I had a sense of deja vu in IBM when we created a successful business around complexity theory and narrative work, with major US Government contracts but it was too different and while the initiative survived as Cognitive Edge it didn’t happen within IBM. If you want more examples then simply look at the accelerating pace of management fads of which Agile is the latest, and it is doomed to go the same way as its predecessors through a false assumption of universality and failure to avoid commoditisation.
A more disturbing application of this to understand recent political changes. Over a few decades in the UK and US alike new-liberalism emerged as a dominant ideology and homogenised the differences between the traditional parties of the right and left. That meant the system started to lack requisite variety and the energy cost of populism was radically reduced with consequences we are still living with. I’ve launched the odd polemical post in this over the last few years, one of which is still relevant.
Now there are lots of ways to manage the cycle. One is to take the various roles I referenced earlier by way of metaphor:
And of course, this is not complete, I am working on a more complete taxonomy here with more work on the characteristics and examples so any contributions are welcome.
A general strategy to get from Alpha to Omega with an upwards trajectory is what I call a symbiotic strategy in which the novel capability is made an apparently insignificant addition aspect of convention and it is thus carried over the chasm. I did this in the GENUS program, adding Objection Orientation and RAD/JAD to legacy system management as a differentiator for DataSciences, and within years the novel material became dominant, we missed out on stage two. A variation of that approach is to introduce a retro-virus, something that changes the DNA of its host. A little bit of imagination and trans-disciplinary access to a range of metaphors is a great asset if you want to do new things in the face of conservative opposition.
In politics the approach is different, homogenisation produces extremism, but you can disrupt the growth of populism but enlightenment models of persuasion will not work. This is not about reason in the enlightenment sense of the world, it is about understanding ideation patterns at a fine level of granularity and identifying new forms of synthesis as well as non-destructive conflict. I’ve been working on that for a couple of years now and we’ve complete some of the related experimental projects needed to validate the theory. I hope to announce more on this soon, but if anyone is interested get in touch.
As I said at the start, this framework is exciting but there is more work to do over the next few years. Part of that is to explore the overlaps with Cynefin: Does a crisis trigger this or shorten the cycle? That is to say, does the framework (or its shape) look different depending on where you are in Cynefin? Does our understanding of aporia allow shortening and de-risking of the cycle? Watch this space …
My original work here was originally triggered or influenced to varying degrees at varying times by Geoffrey A. Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, Charles Handy’s use of S-Curves and Clayton Christensen’s work on disruptive innovation.
Banner photograph of a wolf pack by Thomas Bonometti on Unsplash
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