Managers The Day After Tomorrow revisited, part 3: Big Bang, for real.

Big Bang Disruption, the theory

“At business school, we learned that the process by which consumers pick up new innovations progresses in accordance with a Gauss curve. This curve reflects the idea that companies have ample time to see what early adopters and the early majority do with the products launched by the innovators. By watching and waiting, it is possible to avoid the mistakes and the high costs of these pioneers. As a smart follower, you can learn from the errors of others and amend your own approach in a way that is guaranteed to appeal to the large majority of customers: adjust, hold, repeat.

This kind of slow innovation no longer exists. Today’s innovation is very different. But how exactly does it work? First, there are a number of early signals or early hiccups. These suggest that something new is on the way. Someone is offering something that is completely different. These early hiccups are picked up by the trendsetters. Or perhaps they are not. Some early hiccups come to nothing. However, others attract growing interest. After a succession of early hiccups, an early warning bell starts to ring.

As soon as the new innovation become reasonably well established and is picked up by the ‘average’ customer, things move into overdrive. The different waves of adoption come faster and faster, and have much more impact than was previously the case. In fact, the impact increases exponentially, producing a sharp peak: the shark’s fin curve.”

(Managers The Day After Tomorrow, Rik Vera LANNOO CAMPUS, p31-32)

Big Bang Disruption /Larry Downes & Paul Nunes

The way a consumer picks up on innovation: what we learnt at school against how the real innovators do it today – Gauss versus the shark’s fin.

Big Bang Disruption: it is happening.

We are right in the middle of the biggest Big Bang humanity has ever experienced. COVID-19 has stopped the world as we have known it. The standstill of the global economy is just the calm in the eye of a perfect storm that will be devastating for those that are not ready. Those that have been eating on the remains of old business models and were living in the peace and quiet of the day before yesterday, are doomed.

Because of this world wide standstill the forces that are needed to create the shark fin break through momentum have had the chance to build up and the forces to keep the shark fin from happening have been way to busy just to survive and at the same time the effect of COVID-19 hits all aspects of customer behaviour, society and business in a direct or indirect way, causing disruptive innovation in all of them at the same time. It is one Big Bang next to another and yet another. This is the Mother of all Big Bangs.

In just a few weeks from now, the universe that is formatted by consumer behaviour, society trends and business models, will make a giant leap forward and shark fins will be all over. It is not the fins that are the danger, it is the sharks that come with the fins. Our today will shift into The Day After Tomorrow in just a blink of the eye and those that lived in the day before yesterday will face damage beyond repair. I have but one piece of advice for the laggards: don't scream and run fast. This is your very own The Nightmare On Elmstreet : you may not know it yet, but the public knows for sure that in the next 2 hours you will die in a most horrific way, the only thing that they don’t know is exactly when or how it is going to happen. The harder you scream the sooner you will be found and the harder you run the later the scene in which the inevitable will happen.

 What can you do today?

For the companies that were early majority in the old normal and even better, for those that were early adopters, there is still hope.They still have the chance to not be surprised by the shark fins that will pop up at any time now.

How to do that? It is pretty easy: whatever is going to happen and grow big in the post-Corona new normal should have already been around before the virus struck our society. Underneath the surface, or just surfacing. It is those hiccups we need to focus on. We have to go back in time, just a few weeks and maybe we should pay more attention to the early signals of something new that we could have seen, but preferred not to or that we saw but ignored for whatever reason.

“First, there are a number of early signals or early hiccups. These suggest that something new is on the way.”

 All the early signs I have described in Chapter 3 of my book, explaining the forces  that format the future C.U.S.T.O.M.E.R. were already visible when I wrote that chapter in 2017. Nothing has changed. Those early hiccups have gained power and they have the energy of the momentum. I will re-visit that chapter in the next blogs and elaborate on the 2020 context.

Once one knows what drives the post-corona customer, one can look at the available building blocks and build a customer centric model fit for the new normal.

 The circle model.

(Managers The Day After Tomorrow, Rik Vera LANNOO CAMPUS, p135)