Question · Sustainability
How do I avoid becoming obsolete?
The Short Answer
Stay in the coevolutionary race. Your customers, competitors, and environment are constantly changing - you must change at least as fast to avoid falling behind. Build sensing mechanisms that detect early signals of change, and maintain the organizational capacity to respond.
Biological Insight
The Red Queen hypothesis explains that species must constantly evolve just to maintain their relative fitness - because their competitors and environment are also evolving. Standing still means falling behind. But evolution isn't just random variation; it's variation plus selection. Organizations need mechanisms to generate variation (experimentation) and selection (learning what works).
Key Questions to Ask Yourself
- How are customer needs evolving?
- How are competitors evolving?
- What changes in your environment would make your current strengths irrelevant?
- Do you have mechanisms to detect changes early?
- Do you have the organizational capacity to respond to detected changes?
Common Mistakes
- Assuming current success means future relevance
- Optimizing current business at the expense of future adaptation
- Not investing in sensing mechanisms for environmental change
- Having detection without response capability (knowing but not acting)
- Adapting to the past instead of anticipating the future