Disproportion and Surprises
Wouldn't you like to invest just a little and gain a lot? win the lottery, enjoy good fortunes, a lucky strike?
Or, you might be more familiar with the more upsetting side of this phenomenon, where you put tons of efforts, ‘spit blood’, ‘kill yourself’ on a project trying to solve a wicked problem, make a change, ‘put a dent in the universe’. But, you end up getting nowhere. Nothing is changing or moving, you’re stuck.
Well, both are the two sides of the same coin. Its the ‘surprises, unexpected and dis-proportioned’ coin that we pay with so many times in our strategic planning and change management processes.
How can it be so hard, nearly impossible, to find a balance between our inputs and our desired impact? We never know how much effort will be enough, how much is just excessive, what is the minimal investment needed to achieve our goals.
Welcome complexity into your life…
We live in a world that is growing more and more connected and interdependent by the second. In such a reality many small inputs can bring massive impacts and also many great efforts can just evaporate through the many networked connections without ever effecting anything.
Following some of the US political race from afar, I ask myself often what about Donald Trump? is he such a disproportional surprise of a kind?
Well he’s definitely showing some disproportional impact.
Did you know that during the last month, since the parties conventions finished, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has spent $52 million on ads, while Trump’s campaign spent $0?
And to what effect? Clinton is leading in the polls 41.2% to 35.6%.
So, is it his pretty face which makes such an impact?
Not at all, Trump knows how to make the dynamics work for him. He invested in creating the messages and emotions that do not need to be re-stated anymore in an expensive ad campaign. These messages promote themselves in ongoing feedback. He lets Clinton’s campaign invest all that money just to try to stop his dynamic machine of self perpetuating messages. Clinton would be smarter to think differently on how to counter this strategy.
Whoever wins this coming elections in the US, I can promise you we are in for much more surprises and disproportions as we are accelerating further in our complex and dynamic world.
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