Resilience, not strength, is the new competitive edge
The smell of burning flesh repulsed Autumn Veatch. She let go of her grandfather’s seat buckle, repelled by the intense heat. Her hand, face, hair, and eyebrows burned and shriveled; she staggered back in terror. The lonely screams of her dying grandparents echoed through the forest. No one but Veatch could hear the desperate cries.
Surrounded by fog with no access to GPS, Leland and Sharon Bowman and their granddaughter had been flying blind before crashing into the wilderness. As the small prop plane slammed through pine tree after pine tree until finally reaching an abrupt stop in the Montana forest, the Bowmans’ cries turned from screams to wails to silence.
Alone and afraid, Veatch began to sob and run. She started down a hill that led to a small cliff and fell flat on her back. It was then she knew she needed to stop and think. Natalie Krebs, writing for Outdoor Life, documented what ran through the young girl’s mind, saying she “… recalled the survival shows she had watched with her dad in grade school—shows like ‘Man vs. Wild’ and ‘Dual Survival.’ The two main principles she remembered were to travel downhill and follow water.”
Moments later, Veatch quieted herself and listened. She thought she could hear the rumblings of civiliza-tion. Instead, she would find a river.
Navigating uncertainty is the chief challenge facing brands in today’s economy. We no longer operate in a business environment where size, strength, scale, intellectual property, or longevity provide a sustainable competitive advantage. The increasing pace of disruption resulting from the ubiquity of information and the education and mobility of the workforce has changed everything. So prepare to disrupt. Or be disrupted.
Chris Taylor, a business executive and former U.S. Navy pilot, discussed the fundamental shift from the principles that fueled the Industrial Age to the new principles that drive the Age of Disruption in an article on VentureBeat, writing, “Disruption isn’t just a phase we’re going through. Disruption replaces the industrial concepts of the 1800s and 1900s with faster cycles of change coming with lower levels of investment and risk.”
Disruption isn’t a passing trend. Disruption is the new normal. Uncertainty and continuous change are here to stay. The only way to thrive in the new economy is to prepare for the unexpected. But how can you prepare for something unpredictable? Who has the resources and capacity to prepare for every eventuality? Or, as John Wiseman put it in “The SAS Survival Handbook,” “How can you prepare for what you do not expect?” and “… what chance have you of equipping yourself for the totally unknown disaster?”
In truth, you can’t. Nobody has the time, money, or prescience to prepare for every potentiality. And those who try are effectively paralyzed. If there is anything we have learned from history it is that Great Walls crumble, castles are starved, and Maginot Lines are circumvented. Static strength is weakness waiting to be exposed. Just as Autumn Veatch remembered while lost in the Montana forest, water is life in the wilderness. To effectively navigate uncertainty, it’s of no help to be a rock. You must be a river.
Resilience, not strength, is the new competitive advantage. You cannot prepare for every detail and eventuality. To succeed, you must augment your skill set with a set of principles that prepare you to thrive in any environment, regardless of the details on the ground. Just like the expert survivalist who can be dropped into a desert, a forest, or a frozen tundra and always find a way to survive, you must have a resilient core complemented by a flexible mode of operation that transcends challenges.
The solution to uncertainty lies not in the details but in the ability to rise above the details and adapt to any situation. In the wilderness, water is the one enduring substance that can be detoured but never defeated.
Water has such powers of adaptation because it operates with both structure and freedom. You can scorch water, freeze it, or try to slow it down, but it will always find a way to achieve its singular goal: get to the ocean. No matter how water transforms to overcome an obstacle, it never loses its “waterness.” Whether it separates, shrinks, expands, or flows, it is always water and it will always advance toward its goal. It is at once itself and anything it needs to be. In a word, it is fluid, both as a noun and an adjective. To navigate The Wild, you must be, too.