Disruptive times are often stressful and create uncertainty. But if you can keep your focus, those same conditions also release new opportunities. The once-secure positions of established players can suddenly be up for grabs and customers everywhere start looking for new solutions.
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Whether you are an established incumbent or a new startup, times like these are ripe for innovation, invention, and new strategies. The next great wave of fast growing businesses and new products will find their footing in today's shifting environments. How can you take advantage? Let's explore:
1. First, recognize it
Recognize that disruption is happening. Donβt hope for a stability that's not going to happen.
To capture the opportunity, you must first recognize reality around you. Start with a focus on your assumptions: who are your customers, why do they work with you, and what are their alternatives? How are you acquiring new business? How do you market? What are the essential elements of your supply chain or the drivers of your cost of goods or services?
Today, it's hard not to find areas where AI will change the answers to many of those questions, but also consider the geopolitical, economic, and world events drivers, too.
What's the leading assumption you need to be true to reach your goals? Can you really count on that or do you need to adjust your plan? What has blocked your growth in the past? Will those same constraints last? Maybe now the competitive limits are starting to crack for you.
- Be ruthless in assessing your assumptions
- What macro trends can open up new freedom of action for you?
- What will changes in policy, practice, or technology do to your business?
- Look for overwhelming movement in new directions in your industry and where you should take a contrarian position
2. Return to first principles
Recognizing big changes is essential, but when seeking to build a successful new business or product, identifying what won't change is often even more valuable of a insight to bring to the process.
As Jeff Bezos observed:
I very frequently get the question, "What's going to change in the next ten years?" And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: "What's not going to change in the next ten years?" And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two.
He said that insight helped him focus Amazon on ideas like keeping prices low and delivering orders faster which are features that would never fall in priority.
When identifying what changes are going to drive your market in the next weeks, months, and years, don't forget to remain focused on the elements that will never go out of favor for your customers. What are the pillars that must remain while you rebuild to meet the moment?
- Speed, price, convenience, reliability, resilience, and many other characteristics are going to remain customer priorities no matter how the world changes
- What are your unique market dynamics that aren't going to change?
- Talk to your customers with a focus on understanding underlying motivations and priorities instead of only immediate requests
- A caution: don't over-assume unchanging priorities, but dig deeper to the essential elements only
3. Leverage your unique skills and insights
Tools like skill stacking come into play. Use your unique combination of experience and capabilities to see where markets are moving instead of just where they are today.
I was working in the music industry as the digital growth phase accelerated. We were finding new, fast growing revenue streams all around us at the very moment the traditional revenue from selling CDs and other physical formats was collapsing by 20%+ per year. Being able to shift quickly from lucrative, but ephemeral opportunities like ringtones and mobile downloads to long-term, sustainable revenue from streaming subscriptions required an ability to predict the future. That future was built on confidence that the necessary infrastructure, tech, and product convenience would converge to make a mass market offering take off. It all only seems obvious in retrospect.
- Use what you uniquely know and understand
- Look for parallels from other industries that have evolved through similar disruptions to their practices
- Identify converging trends in technology change, user behavior evolution, and demographics
- Find targets that require the fewest of your assumptions to be correct for you to succeed
4. Embrace the accelerating pace of change
Change is difficult to manage. That's true for everyone. The sooner you embrace it, the faster you'll be able to take advantage.
Technology is a primary driver. From the personal computer to the Internet to the explosion of generative AI tools and resources, we are seeing ever-faster changes in the business cycle. Overlay the current political environment with seemingly daily changes in economic policy and nimble decision making is simply essential.
Be flexible and open to revising your strategy in response to changed conditions. The old saw applies here: planning is essential even if the plans prove worthless.
- Wishing for a long-term status quo won't make it so
- As software eats much of the world, change is only accelerating
- The ability to respond to change faster than your competitors is a primary competitive advantage
- Be relentless in your focus on your goals, but flexible in your means of reaching them
5. Action over all
There are some significant upsides to embracing this accelerating rate of change. It cracks open markets for both businesses and individuals.
The demand for effective leadership that can operate in this environment is greater than ever. And fast growth opens new opportunities for individual contributors, too. With new work to be identified and executed, new roles emerge frequently.
Start with some domain knowledge and make a commitment to learning on a fast cycle. But don't get stuck in trying to catch up through only education and training. That will miss the moment.
Learn a little, then try a lot. Learn a little more, then tray a lot more. The operative word is action. Do things don't just analyze and strategize. Take action.
- In periods of disruption, the essential knowledge is only learned by trying something and collecting the feedback
- Talk to customers, build quickly, iterate in response
- When the ground is shifting fast, only empirical data learned from doing will teach you what you need to know
- There is no substitute for taking massive action
Action Summary
Itβs easy to look back and wish you had an easier time, but this is that time for the future you. Now is a time of great disruption in many fields and that means new opportunities for you.
Consider this a call to action. Meet the moment. What do you uniquely know and understand? How can you combine that with other critical knowledge from those around you? What trends can you leverage to innovate in new, unexpected ways? What roadblocks are falling away in response?
- Recognize what's happening
- Identify the essential core
- Bring your unique mix of skills and experience to make unique insights about the opportunity you should pursue
- Embrace the pace of change
- You must take action to learn the essential lessons
What action will you take?
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What do you think? Is now one of these opportune times in your business? Reply to this email and let me know.
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To your success,
Christopher
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P.S. Like this one? You'll probably want to check out this earlier Wednesday Win essay on the essential focus you need to make a major leap forward, too.
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