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Being able to anticipate future threats, obligations, and opportunities is an essential skill for corporate innovators and business professionals alike.

The laws of physics dictate the fundamentals of any marketplace. Although in times of rapid change, such as the complexities presented during industrial revolutions (we're navigating the fourth industrial revolution), it becomes difficult to anticipate how a market, competitors, employees, and colleagues will reach to a constantly changing landscape.

Those behaviors that are not required to change, including fundamental business concerns, can guide the design of new strategies, offers, products, services, and business models.

Although it’s difficult to assess the specific moves competitors and marketplace actors will make, it's safe to assume they will act in their own best interests to take care of their concerns. Based on these assumptions, a narrow range of options emerge.

Additionally, having time to prepare for future scenarios is mission critical. Without time to design new offers, counter-measures, and responses to the moves of marketplace actors, organizations and individuals are pressured to respond. Having more time to compete is always a competitive advantage — it’s the difference between play in the first quarter versus the final minutes of a football match.

But, how do organizations, innovation and growth teams, and individuals anticipate future threats, obligations, and opportunities produced from a rapidly changing marketplace?

Specific moves are difficult if not impossible to predict. Simply knowing a new offer, product, or service is in development is table steaks.

Taking care of threats, obligations, and opportunities — in that order — are also instructive. It’s impossible to exploit new opportunities without first taking care of obligations. Adequately addressing obligations without first neutralizing threats will almost certainly produce breakdowns.

On Threats

Regardless of whether the market is in a recessionary or depressionary situation is less relevant to the fact that radical marketplace drifts are already occurring.

Marketplace drift occurs when new threats, obligations, and opportunities are opened up due to shifts, changes, disruptions, and innovation in technology, demographics, economics, and politics. During less turbulent times, changes in more than one of these spaces is atypical although not extraordinary. In our current moment, radical change in all of these areas — and more — are taking place.

When radical change occurs in multiple domains simultaneously, then a wide-open environment ensues.

It becomes difficult to assess this environment because a threat could also serve as an opportunity and usually does - this represents the organized chaos of the marketplace. Resorting to fundamentals use usually instructive but even now the fundamentals are evolving. Here are a few examples of radical change in multiple domains:

Technology: ChatGPT — A new artificial intelligence that’s arguably, more advanced than anything previously released to the public.

Politics: Populism — Although populism isn’t necessary new, it’s certainly a shift from most recent history. With populism being dormant for so long, at least in its current form, current business leaders have yet to encounter this form of politics. Polarity - In the US and many other large countries, political polarization is at all times highs as middle ground and compromise disappear.

Demographics: With evolutions in medicine and technology, how humans take care of their concerns have evolved radically in the past 10 years. Not everyone is prepared for this change.

Economics: Cryptocurrencies — Bitcoin and other algorithmic currencies are reshuffling currencies and the power structures attached to them.

How are you adapting to these changes?

On Obligations

How humans take care of concerns is shifting because of marketplace drifts in the domains of technology, demographics, culture, politics, and economics. Radically.

Technology is shifting how humans care for their body.

Remote health care, software applications, wearables, and data analytics offer new and convenient ways to care for themselves — if they know how. Not everyone possesses the appropriate knowledge to utilize these tools therefore shifting their obligation to do so, or they suffer the consequences.

Economics is shifting how business professionals earn a living.

No longer are gold plated pensions available after years of service to a single, or a few, organizations. Now, with massive money printing, inflation, rising expenses, and questionable demand — producing revenues, income, and protecting assets has shifted the responsibility to the individual. Once again, this is incredibly enabling for those who obligate to learn how to design new offers in this environment while simultaneously producing new threats for those who decline.

Shifts and new offers in the domains of community, networking, and membership has radically changed over the past decade and has accelerated in the remote work environment.

The days of networking for business at the local chamber has been replaced with digital advertising, online communities, and new technology driven membership opportunities. This is incredibly empowering for those who embrace these new spaces of possibilities while closing down options for business professionals who disregard or ignore these shifts.

The pattern here is, and to be cliche: when one door closes, another opens.

On Opportunities

Marketplace drift prompted by the continuation of the fourth industrial revolutions continues to exert pressure on the marketplace.

Those pressures wax and wane depending on the features of a particular moment. The introduction of new technologies, advances in economic models, demographic changes, and political power structures impose themselves on us. Individuals and organizations either adapt to these changes and survive or don’t and suffer the consequences.

The forms and shapes of opportunities shift in response to marketplace drift. Consumer and client preferences change in direct correlation to the value of their offers, products, and services. Continual innovation drives much of this pressure opening and closing opportunities to profit.

An additional feature of radically changing times is the prevalence of winner take all competitions.

These competitions produce lethal threats that if ignored exert serious consequences. Winner take all competitions aren’t fair nor are they equally distributed. This fog of the marketplace makes it difficult to survive and thrive but not impossible.

New offers that deliver compelling value is a fundamental solution to this predicament.

But, the knowledge to design, make and produce compelling offers is scarce. It’s not included within popular business books — that knowledge is, obviously, available to the masses and is therefore common. Anyone can use it.

The value of new offers that produce uncommon marginal utilities will eventually be competed away. This is the core reason why continual innovation through the design of new, compelling offers that deliver uncommon value is the fundamental solution to living a good life in a radically changing global marketplace.

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