Epic Collapse

A Bit Lost, Chris Haughton

A Bit Lost

Author’s Note: This was originally published as Goodbye to All That, a Fresh Paint Perspective, at the close of 2021. It’s been refreshed this morning to reflect current events.

It’s easy to see the end of things, to grasp intuitively that you’re standing astride some sort of stark rupture in the historical timeline, a point between rot and genesis, to know that you’ve stayed too long at The Fair.

“We don’t know if we’re going to succeed, but we do know is what’s in place today isn’t working,” said (now former) Novartis president Marie-France Tschudin. “We need to take a different approach.” At the time, she was describing the need to re-conceptualize strategy for the launch of a new heart drug, but her vision echos an ask for something deeper, more fundamental, a more radical shift in understanding that’s bouncing across the halls of nearly all business and government and academic settings in the West: a complete overhaul in the nature of “strategy” itself.

And so what’s emerging as the building blocks for professional success today are management teams who can work with a new set rules that have imposed themselves (or been imposed by others) on the old order of things,

“We would be safer if we had our own nuclear arsenal,” Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister, said in a speech to his country’s parliament earlier this year. The reason he gave was the “profound change of American geopolitics,” a euphemism for what Pfizer’s Albert Bourla accurately described as the epic collapse of the conventional frame of reference in an interview with Semafor in January (Pfizer’s Albert Bourla on Trump 2.0: ‘The status quo will collapse’).

In March, Trump spoke at the quarterly meeting of the Business Roundtable. This is how Reuters covered things (Trump defends tariffs before corporate America as stocks sell off):

“U.S. President Donald Trump defended his use of tariffs and said they could multiply as he met on Tuesday with the CEOs of America’s biggest companies, many of whom have watched their market value crater over recession and inflation fears.

Speaking to business leaders and reporters before the roundtable, Trump defiantly maintained his stance, dismissed market volatility and vowed that investors would see gains for putting money to work now.

“The tariffs are going to be throwing off a lot of money for this country,” he said to CEOs. “It may go up higher.”

The executives in the room sat expressionless as Trump spoke during a brief part of the meeting that was open to the press. There was scattered chuckling when Trump said there were some people in the room he did not like.

Rance Priebus, who was chief of staff during Trump’s first White House, was hired at the beginner of the year by Centerview Partners, a boutique investment bank with deep Democratic roots, to help clients curry favor with, or simply make sense of, the world according to Trump. Centerview’s business is advising CEOs, and CEOs want to know how to work with Trump — or at least stay out of his line of fire. Positioning a merger as pro-America or securing carve-outs from tariffs could be worth billions of dollars.

The delicate art of strategic fit is all about big system innovation, propelled by innovation in big deal-making, which in turn is shaped and sold by thinking and strategizing at a system level (to dig deeper, see The Art of The System, published last month by Blue Spoon).

The traditional corporate view that companies could ignore what’s going on in Washington has been shattered. That shattering is part of a bigger theme. What’s changed is the world around us is now within us. There is no ‘out there’ that separates the observer from the observed. “Government” is not separate from the “industry” or market it regulates. Customer and client are one organism, one economic system (the source code for Palantir’s strategic success so far).

From Ecosystem-Centered Business Strategy, Blue Spoon’s ground-breaking framework for big system innovation published and presented at the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies:

The shape and texture of most mainstream economic theories reflects a two-sided view of market exchange. Competition between economic systems takes the form of competition between agents within those systems, not between the systems themselves.

The actions of government and the foundations for law, built over centuries, have reseeded the grass for this playing field, and the teams who play on the pitch are assumed to know the rules. The role of policy is not to participate in the game, but to manage it, to make sure the parts are prevented from destabilising the whole, and the whole is prevented from destabilising the parts. But the international system in which all businesses and governments now find themselves poses something new entirely. Legal institutions have not kept pace with technology. Government is realizing that it is not separate from the market. Markets are less two-sided than they are N-sided, involving connections and interactions between global networks of buyers and sellers.

The game has clearly changed.

Rather than simply riding the bouncing ball and fighting to avoid being on the bottom when it bounces, it’s time for “leadership” to start working with a more unique cognitive pattern.

“As 2022 draws near, it is time to face the world’s predictable unpredictability,” wrote The Economist in The New Normal is Already Here. Get Used to It, its commentary closing out 2021. “The pattern for the rest of 2020s is not the familiar routine of the pre-covid years, but the turmoil and bewilderment of the pandemic era. The new normal is already here.. Any boss who thinks their industry is immune to such wild dynamism is unlikely to last long”.

Shhh! We Have a Plan

US Republicans, reeling from devastating election losses, are facing questions about how to course-correct with President Donald Trump battered by low approval ratings and internal dissent, the Washington Post is reporting this morning. The party struggles to motivate MAGA voters when Trump is not on the ballot, and “strategists are divided on whether Trump should get more involved to fire up the base, or whether congressional Republicans should distance themselves from Trump’s increasingly unpopular tariffs.”

Change comes in three wavelengths: There are changes to the game, changes in the rules of the game, and changes in how the rules are changed. The world is flailing to find ‘strategic fit’ to the latter.

It’s legacy thinking -- not technology -- that’s maybe the biggest barrier to navigating the transition space to a new era. Leadership teams become kinetically-trapped in outmoded structures, orientations, incentives and systems of belief, doomed to be, always, in defense of whatever economic model allowed them to be successful in the first place. Most “digital transformations” reinforce the obsolete.

We keep re-submerging ourselves in familiar storylines.

Having normalized cliche, “old” narratives have veto power over the new, keeping us running on the watery residue of the past. Incrementalism edges out exploration.

We tinker in proven domains. We try to survive in a remnant context.

Existential crises abound. Everyone is a bit lost. Everyone is looking for a new reference point from which to fit into a world of which everyone is a part. Look no further than Moderna’s continuing and entirely predictable “strug­gles to sell its vac­cines, posting pal­try RSV sales in third quar­ter”, cryptocurrencies threat to central banks, or at the level of geoeconomcs, the cracking of United States brand leadership and the rise of Brand China “remaking the international system” according to its rules. The world is now littered with dying companies, markets and industries buying into the myth of a simple recipe, the allure of new technology, and an obsession with tradition as they search for optimal solutions that don’t exist.

It’s the ‘leadership margin’ that now separates: you have to be comfortable crossing the river as you’re feeling for the stones. The skill in short supply is not technical, but visionary, able to articulate and propagate a new direction, a ‘modern strategy story’ to manage a new interface layer with the world.

We have to rearrange the comfortable mental furniture from which we sit and guide thought and action, rather than simply hoping, always hoping, for the best from legacy operating models sustaining a fragile status quo. The hard thing is to “break the golden rhythm” of the place in our minds that we know has stopped working for us intellectually, creatively and spiritually.

“I could not tell you when I began to understand that. All I know is that it was very bad when I was twenty-eight. Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen. I could no longer sit in little bars near Grand Central and listen to someone complaining of his wife’s inability to cope with the help while he missed another train to Connecticut. I no longer had any interest in hearing about the advances other people had received from their publishers, about plays that were having second-act troubles in Philadelphia, or about people I would like very much if I just came out to meet them. I had already met them, always.”

Joan Didion, Goodbye to All That

From the Blue Spoon perspective, what’s happening worldwide is a new “payer” story emerging, a wholesale realignment around economic populism, powered by anger as an energy. People are pissed off, at scale.

“The breakthrough came when I made the bird fall from his nest”, says Chris Haughton, the Irish Illustrator whose picturebooks for children (A BIT LOST, OH NO GEORGE!, SHH! WE HAVE A PLAN and GOODNIGHT EVERYONE) have been translated into more than 24 languages and won awards in 10 countries. “That way he was lost and had to engage with the other animals in a way that wasn’t about avoiding being eaten.”

Solid advice.

The right lesson to draw from Mamdani’s (and Trump’s) win is this: don’t compete as a defender of the establishment in an era of upheaval. It’s time to sweep the old economic concepts out of the saddle. It’s time to start working with a new category of ideas.

And that process starts with a renegade narrative.

/ jgs

John G. Singer is Executive Director of Blue Spoon, the global leader in positioning strategy at a system level. Blue Spoon specializes in constructing new narratives.