What doesn't change

I’m in the middle of promotion for my recently released book, No Point B. (Side note: Seeing my book in an actual bookstore was a surreal experience.)

At an event last week for the Executives’ Club of Chicago, I was asked a great question, along the lines of this famous Jeff Bezos quote: I talk a lot about change, but what do I think doesn’t change?

The book is about the mechanics of transformation, and ultimately, I believe many of those principles are timeless:

• People have individual desires and biases that make us susceptible to misunderstanding the world, especially where it’s going;

• We are complicated systems that interact with other complicated systems (other people), within complicated systems (companies, communities, society), and that level of complexity makes predicting the future hard, and understanding the consequences of decision making even harder;

• But within that complexity, people behave at scale in ways we can predict and design interventions for;

• Top-down interventions will almost always fail, whereas getting people involved making the kind of change they want to see is a predictor of success;

• Disruption is never going to stop coming, but we can see our own agency, and design the kind of future we want to see.

The tools we use right now are obviously very specific to our environment, and I go into detail talking about the positive and negative effects the internet has on our ability to make change. We’re in a particularly disruptive moment right now not in small part to our media environment.

But I also start the book talking about how terrible we are at predicting the future for a reason. I agree with Bezos (gulp) that good strategy focuses not on what’s next, but on what is constant—and what is constant is that the world is always going to be evolving. Good strategy grounds us in a long term roadmap; building adaptive capability makes sure our organizations are capable of getting there.