Another Aspect of Orientation
The system isn’t broken—it’s just not built for you anymore.
When John Boyd talked about getting inside other people’s decision cycles, he was referring to disrupting and outpacing their decision-making process so thoroughly that they become disoriented and incapable of effective response. More specifically, operating at a faster tempo or with greater agility than your adversary creates confusion, disorder, and hesitation in their decision-making process. It involves shaping their perceptions and reactions so that they start responding to your moves rather than executing their own strategy, and ultimately, it leads to paralysis—the opponent is constantly reacting, never able to take the initiative or regain control.
This may sound and feel uncomfortably familiar to many of us at this moment. Indeed, if it is a deliberate strategy by the American Administration, it is working rather well right now. Fortunately, however, the man who conceived the strategy also identified how to counter it. At its core, it means not falling into the trap of reacting. More specifically, to vary your actions and inputs to create ambiguity, decentralize and empower your organisation, and use variety and harmony to avoid being predictable.
Accordingly, I don’t want to get sucked into the energy of the current debate (any more than I already have). And so, I took a step back and thought about the foundation of free trade principles and what lessons, as individuals, we might learn in relation to the changing world of work.
The foundation of free trade is to be found in David Ricardo’s "On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation", published in 1817. His theory of comparative advantage says that even if one country (or person) is more efficient at producing everything than another, both can still benefit from trade if they each specialise in what they are relatively better at.
It’s not about being the best at everything, but about being less bad at something.
Clearly, it is not only comparative but relative. Over time, if those who can, say, produce more cheaply because of local wage rates also get better at designing and creating what is produced, and those who have taken advantage of the cheap labour they have accessed don’t make something genuinely new, the game changes. Comparative advantage disappears.
Unless those who have taken advantage of the (temporarily) cheap labour to create and move into a space of advantage from where they can repeat the outsourcing exercise, it’s game over. The challenge we face is that across the West, and in America in particular, we have been so busy exploiting temporary advantage that we convinced ourselves it was the new order of things.
It’s not, of course, and it’s easy to understand the panic that arises as the realisation dawns that what was outsourced cannot really be brought home because the skills have atrophied and the costs are prohibitive. It makes excellent political soundbites but nonsense economics.
We can’t go back, so we have to go forward whilst recognising that those we took advantage of have not only caught up but that they are fitter.
What interests me more is closer to home. Moving from macro to microeconomics, large organisations have been caught in the same Ricardo trap. The combination of easy access to distant markets and the power of outsourcing not just to access distant cheap labour but also use its leverage to reduce local labour costs has been a huge but temporary thrill. Organisations built around models of extraction and exploitation are remarkably poor at creating what is needed to sustain medium-term advantage as engines for growth. From supermarkets’ relationships with farmers and suppliers, to Universities’ relationships with foreign students, the easy wins are exhausted.
Just as we have reached an inflexion point with geoeconomics, perhaps we have also reached an inflexion point with local economics. The fulcrum is AI.
As AI does what process did previously, the human comparative advantage moves from the lowest cost, repeatable, pattern-based tasks to judgement, emotional nuance, adaptability, and sense-making in ambiguity.
The implications for us as individuals are profound. Relative Advantage, which our organisation has conferred on us for so long, has become much more personal. As those of us who have been experimenting with AI are realising, we have to learn to “trade” with AI, allocating tasks to machines where appropriate and focusing our energies on complementary skills where we have a relative advantage.
It affects our work identity. Instead of being good at our work as defined by others, our “work product” is heavily influenced by the combination of our unique abilities, insights and motivations partnered with the power of AI. Job descriptions and other traditional tools of management become ever more like the man with the red flag walking in front of the first automobiles.
Ricardo helps us see that this is not a race against AI, but a collaboration with it—towards better alignment of our time, energy, and skills.
Then, we hit the catalyst. The reality of VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain. Complex and Ambiguous) has moved from a 20-year-old acronym for strategists to a day-to-day lived experience for all of us. Efficiency requires that the world is stable. VUCA harnesses the reality that it’s changing quickly. Organisations designed for efficiency have a suite of problems.
Firstly, organisations are no longer the locus of control. Disengagement levels are high, trust is low, and the generation entering the workforce no longer sees their attraction.
Secondly, we’re still educating for efficiency and, in so doing, feeding those who fit the traditional needs of efficient organisations to the machine guns of AI and discontinuous change.
So now, we’re into the real long game. If AI, flexibility, and human uniqueness are rewriting the rules of advantage, then how we enable people to thrive—both in school and at work—needs a fundamental rethink. Not a tweak. A re-architecture.
The average organisational lifespan is shrinking—not just because of disruption, but because the assumptions that once preserved longevity now accelerate obsolescence.
In a world of accelerating change, the most valuable thing we can teach is how to be more fully human. We don’t need better cogs. We need people who can play with the machine, not be trapped inside it.
Which brings us to the big question. How do we go about it and avoid the frantic, dysfunctional responses we are seeing in the world economy as the new reality bites?
Something I notice that I know many others do is how the nature of “talent” is changing. It no longer comes in individual-sized human packages that can be bought off the supermarket shelf. It is networked. Talent is a system, not an individual.
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."
John Muir
You are not defined by the organisation you work for, but more by the company you keep, from individuals to ideas. If I want to know who you are, your resumé tells me nothing useful. The conversations you have, on the other hand, tell me everything.
Back to Boyd. As efficient organisations become ever more paralysed by responding to erratic stimuli, whether the product of a fiendish strategy or, more likely, political hubris, we should not fall into the same trap.
Now is the time to step into who we are, and find our place in what is emerging.
It’s easier said than done, but on a call last evening with the Outside the Walls Mighty Network group, something simple became very clear.
Being ready does not require a plan, or a strategy, because the current volatility makes that ineffective for now. What we need is much simpler. To join conversations away from the noise in a place where we can learn what we need to learn, uncover who we are, and where we belong, with others doing the same.
Every Wednesday evening, 5:00 pm UK, we join on Zoom to do this. If you’d like to join us, drop me a line…