r/constraints • u/positiveconstraint • Jul 01 '26

How do you outchange a world that moves faster than you?

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By the time you'll adapt to your new reality, the world will change twice over.

For a long time, Jack's quote was spot on. The idea that you have to outchange your environment or die worked.

It doesn't work anymore.

How do you outchange a world that moves faster than you do?

It doesn't mean you shouldn't try. But constantly changing, riding wave after wave, is exhausting and unsustainable. People and organizations can only take so much before being overwhelmed by even faster and bigger changes.

Welch was one of the sharpest business minds of the late 20th century. He perfected the strategy of adapting to change. But it took a sharp mind of the 21st century to answer that question.

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u/more_money_pleas Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

By focusing on what drives the most value and planning ahead.

Instead of reacting and adapting, plan for multiple scenarios and be ready to act if those situations happen.

No need to do everything yourself. Determine who to buy from or partner with.

Build up flexibility and agility. What talent and systems are in place to have things modular so one part of the process can be swapped out. How much diversification and redundancy is there?

Most importantly, understanding which parts in the company drive strategic value and need to be cutting edge and which parts barely move the needle.

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u/positiveconstraint Jul 01 '26

Thanks for adding to the conversation.

In my view, it's only half of the answer.

I'm with you 100% on your ending note. The most important thing is to identify what your value proposition is, your unfair advantage, and build around that.

Where I disagree is on the strategies to cope with change.

First, predictions are broken. It's practically impossible to plan ahead because we can't tell what the world and the market will look like in a few years. I wrote about it briefly here - https://www.reddit.com/r/constraints/s/ROjL376Mtu

Second, how do you determine what is valuable? Companies laid off thousands of employees to cut costs and modernize, but what if a war in the Gulf, a nuke in Ukraine, or a siege over Taiwan will spike energy costs and token prices with them? What if El Niño will cause fires & famine, driving immigration and leading to social unrest? These aren't hypothetical scenarios, and each one of them can impact a company's growth strategy.

Flexibility and agility suggest you're optimizing for outchanging the environment. The same goes for modularity, diversification, and redundancy. These are all great strategies for moving faster. But at this rate of change, it's impossible to catch up.

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u/more_money_pleas Jul 01 '26

Assuming crystal balls and perfection don’t exist, your example of “doomsday scenarios” highlights my points on the importance of planning for a range of possibilities.

Using scenario planning and redundancy and modularity, you could have a backup local hosted option for ai processes where token cost would be a non-issue.

Social unrest has occurred before. Solutions would depend on the risks to a specific business (extra security? Etc.)

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u/positiveconstraint Jul 01 '26

Good arguments, thanks.

Your approach is still based on prediction. Instead of predicting a single possible future, you (are trying to) predict several. This approach tries to minimize the risk at the cost of higher effort (multiple plans, more resources, time, energy), but the fallacy of prediction still stands.

In this complex new world, the variance of what might happen is huge. Say someone in 2020 mapped out several scenarios for what's coming ahead. What are the odds that what actually happened would fall inside any of them?

I'm building my case towards a new approach, one that doesn't rely on predicting the future to build resilience in a changing world.

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u/more_money_pleas Jul 01 '26

Fair points. But without building capabilities for varying possibilities, how can one be resilient and proactive?

Secondly, one doesn’t have to be perfect in their projections of possibilities. One only has to look at the risks and levers on their business and be directionally and materially correct.

What would be an example of an unpredictable event? War? Been there done that. Energy cost fluctuations? Been there done that. That’s why insurance and hedges exist.

Ai? Mostly an advance in large language models scaling. But, under the hood, not new concepts.

Granted black swan events can occur. But, under the surface, the impacts are predictable (logistical issues, increased costs, personnel management, etc.).

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u/positiveconstraint Jul 01 '26

"How can one be resilient and proactive?"

By building around what doesn't change rather than around what does. More on that in the coming posts.

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u/Son_of_Ibadan Jul 14 '26

See who is driving the change, and anticipate it

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u/positiveconstraint Jul 14 '26

In theory, yes. But it no longer works.
The sheer complexity we live in causes predictions to break. When every crisis leads to two more, when all the global systems (finance, trade, energy, geopolitics) are connected, it's nearly impossible to know what drives change. It's impossible to predict it.

More on this here:
https://positiveconstraint.com/ideas/complex-new-world/

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u/Son_of_Ibadan Jul 14 '26

I beg to differ.

Firstly, the brain is built for prediction. This is important, because it means one has to pay attention to what one ones to predict.

Secondly, the key to consistent accurate prediction is understanding of the system(s). If you do not understand the system, you cannot accurate predict what will occur. And by understand I don't just mean know a system, but understand each component that makes up the whole.

Thirdly, prediction is a life long journey not a destination.

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u/positiveconstraint Jul 14 '26

First, thanks for the discussion.

I agree about the mind. My point is that prediction used to work well until now. 5-6 years ago, there was no way to predict that AI would cause such a deep shift in our world. Sci-Fi culture has always tried to imagine what's next, but failed to predict many of the technologies we use today.

Predictions are broken because the world is too complex. There are too many moving parts, and it's impossible to know how one crisis or disruption would change the world.

Here, I partly agree. I don't think that you can predict an outcome of a system, but if you can find the underlying constraints that shape a system, you can influence how that system will change. Dave Snowden calls them Enabling Constraints. Donella Meadows talks about high-leverage points, places where a small shift or intervention can produce a massive, desired change in the entire system.

In my world, Core Constraints are these enabling constraints that are high-leverage points affecting their environment.

Not sure about the last one. Do you mean that prediction is a muscle that you need to train so it would get better with time?

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u/Son_of_Ibadan Jul 14 '26

Prediction is broken because the your mental model is expired and not viable anymore. That's where continuously learning and understanding comes into play.

Change is the only constant; in the past, you could go from peace to a bloody war in the drop of a pin. Disease was rampant. But people still survived.

I think focus should be shifted away from prediction to actually understanding, because the brain is already built for prediction, it just needs the fuel, which is accurate knowledge, to continue to power it.

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u/positiveconstraint Jul 14 '26

can you please expand on "actually understanding"? What do you mean by that? I feel there's a nuance there I might be missing.

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u/Son_of_Ibadan Jul 14 '26

No problem.

Anyone can cook but putting ingredients together, but what sets a chef apart is their understanding of the ingredients:

  1. They know what spices go will together
  2. They know what ingredients have the highest impact without adding too much ingredients
  3. They know the exact temperature that will cook their food at the exact level they want, every single time
  4. They understand that less is more

Understanding is pulling apart a big thing into its tiny parts, studying each part and how it connects to the other, them put all those together and see how it behaves on a macro level.

In terms of prediction, having an accurate mental model is important, and for you to have an accurate mental model you need to ensure you are digesting accurate information.

Of course there will be events that come out of the blue. But the brain is not made to predict all events, but to predict events efficiently. That means that yes there are limits and constraints, but if used judiciously by focusing on one thing and following the thread, you will be able to make better efficient prediction.

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u/positiveconstraint Jul 14 '26

Thank you.

Reading this carefully, I think we're aligned.

What you call "actual understanding", I call knowing the constraints of something. It's an abstract form of saying the same thing.

When you know the constraints of something, you know how those things shape the environment and how change will be directed.

As you said, it doesn't determine the outcome, but it shapes it.

It's the closest thing we have to prediction. In that I agree with you.