The shape of progress
How nonlinearity dominates the creation of disruptive ventures
Business schools have this well-honed term. Hockey stick growth. They are taught to be looking for startups with this kind of growth. While the internal mechanics of this process remain somewhat unfamiliar to the observers/academics. The reason why its important is, that if you are a person living the experience of creating something, creating value, either as a company, or as a startup of self, you need to be intimately aware of the internal processes. Awareness is the first step to their mastery.
The figure below shows the evolution of a business from a nascent idea, to a successful venture and beyond.
We basically see three distinct zones. In A, as is shown, the progress is very very slow. Time is moving, but the progress is painstakingly slow. In the middle phase of B, the progress is quite rapid, almost as a line. That means you can quite clearly extrapolate how much more progress would have happened by the elapse of next time unit. And then as the venture grows, the progress becomes harder and harder, until we reach the region C, where the progress comes down to a trickle.
The hard thing about hard things
Ok, so progress is slow in the beginning, it picks up after a while, etc. Whats new. Well, one thing that one could miss just by looking at this diagram, is the measure of effort. The effort required to make this progress follows almost an inverted trajectory. This is a secondary consideration for business schools. But for the psychology of creation, for the mindset of the person within, this is primary. Here is the effort graph over time.
For the little , slow, treacherous progress in the beginning, the effort is the highest !!! which then slowly scales down, during the middle phase B where rapid progress is made with a modest amount of effort. And eventually, once the idea has run its course, the effort actually decreases, both in absolute terms, and in incremental terms. We can think of this period as the space, in which there is not a lot of motivation for additional effort. An idea has run its course. You don't see a lot of room ahead for it. So the effort scales down and the progress becomes incremental too. That's the hard thing about creation. The slowest amount of progress, comes in complete sync with the highest amount of effort !!!
Practical implications
A leader who for example is tuned to the dynamics of medium to large organizations, can easily loose sight of the A region in the curve. He is used to linear progress. X amount of progress happens in Y amount of time. 2X amount of progress happens in 2Y amount of time. The reasoning is seductive. The assumption is linearity. Progress and effort follow some proportional formula. Tremendous amount of effort and little to no progress….. How could that be. That is the nature of early stage creationism. That's how you go from nothing, to adding concrete value. A tremendous amount of effort, and excoriatingly slow progress. There is a flip side to it too. Its a litmus test. If you feel like you are making decent amount of progress as function of time, with modest effort, there has to be something intrinsically wrong. Its not destined to be a tremendous value creating venture that you are imagining it to become. You have to take a hard, dispassionate look at things. And understand and assimilate the fact that, the slowness of progress and extremity of effort, are the most basic of the prerequisites for creating unique value.
Now you know it. It would be hard. But a certain special kind of hard. A hard where output seems disconnected with input. This is as true in business as in life. For tremendous creation of value, you have to labor in love for years and years to no end. And then suddenly, with one final push, the flood gate of goodies will burst forth.
