While understanding the competitive Landscape is extremely helpful, it’s also important to understand the Climate — the external forces acting upon it. These are the broader rules of the game, the patterns of the seasons, and competitor actions.
Below are two patterns you’ve already encountered.
Pattern 1: Everything Evolves Through Supply and Demand Competition
If the conditions exist that a person or groups of people will strive to gain some form of advantage or control over others due to a constraint (i.e. a limitation of a resource or time or money or people) then we have competition.
If competition exists then the components effected will evolve until they become industrialised. This impacts everything from activities (what we do), practices (how we do something), data (how we measure something) to knowledge (how we understand something).
Genesis |
Custom |
Product
|
Commodity
|
|
Focus on exploring |
Focus on learning and developing the craft |
Focus on refining and improving |
Focus on ruthlessly removing deviation, industrialising, and increasing operational efficiency |
Pattern 2: Characteristics Change as Capabilities Evolve
The characteristics of a component in the uncharted space are not the same as the characteristics of the same component when it becomes industrialised.
A company has to manage both the extremes along with the evolution between them. It’s really important to remember that there is a transition from uncharted to industrialised. Don’t organise by the extremes alone.
|
|
|||
| Uncharted | Industrialised | ||
| Chaotic | Ordered | ||
| Uncertain | Known | ||
| Unpredictable | Measured | ||
| Changing | Stable | ||
| Different | Standard | ||
| Exciting | Obvious | ||
| Future Worth | Low Margin | ||
| Unusual | Essential | ||
| Rare | Ubiquitous | ||
| Poorly Understood | Defined | ||
| Experimentation | Volume Operations | ||
| Differential | Operational Efficiency | ||
| Competitive Advantage | Cost of Doing Business | ||
Table of Climatic Patterns
Below are Climatic Patterns that can be studied and integrated into strategic thinking about Competition, Components (Capabilities), Finances, Inertia, Prediction, and Speed. Mouse over each cell for more detailed descriptions.
| Competitors | Competitors actions will change the game | Most competitors have poor situational awareness | ||
| Components | Everything evolves through supply and demand competition | Evolution consists of multiple waves of diffusion with many chasms | No choice over evolution | Commoditisation does not equal Centralisation |
| Characteristics change as components evolve | No single method fits all | Components can co-evolve | ||
| Financial | Higher order systems create new sources of value | Future value is inversely proportional to the certainty we have over it. | Efficiency does not mean a reduced spend | Evolution to higher order systems results in increasing energy consumption |
| Capital flows to new areas of value | Creative Destruction | |||
| Inertia | Success breeds inertia | Inertia increases the more successful the past model is | Inertia can kill an organisation | |
| Prediction | You cannot measure evolution over time or adoption | The less evolved something is then the more uncertain it is | Not everything is random | Economy has cycles |
| Two different forms of disruption | A “war” (point of industrialisation) causes organisations to evolve | |||
| Speed | Efficiency enables innovation | Evolution of communication can increase the speed of evolution overall | Change is not always linear | Shifts from product to utility tend to demonstrate a punctuated equilibrium |
Courtesy of Simon Wardley, CC BY-SA 4.0.