The S-Curve Ahead of Us

We’ve entered a new market where the dimensions of strategy and futurism have changed.

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I’ve been on a keynote tour talking about mental models that will change the world, and there is one model that strikes people more than any other. It’s a model for seeing the future, but what it really demands is that we change the way we look at ourselves as experts.

How you understand and cope with change will define the next 10 years of your life. I can guarantee that. And this article is a bit of a reality check for all of us.

This is an s-curve, and it generally describes the growth of any new market or innovation over time:

In the beginning of the curve, the market grows rapidly. There’s a lot of uncertainty but also a lot of value to be captured. There are very few knowns and very few rules, because we don’t really know what we’re dealing with yet. There is little certainty to lean on, but enormous potential waiting to be realized. Winning is very hard but very lucrative.

In the second half of the curve, the market matures and we generally understand what we’re dealing with. Now we’ve created standards, best practices, and expertise. We know the rules and boundaries of the market or the innovation that we are dealing with, and the value to be captured tapers off as we form more and more insight. Winning is easier, but there isn’t as much value to go around.

The reality check is that we have lived the last two decades at the top half of this curve:

When you are at the top half of this curve, the game is all about optimization, which is the era we have just lived through. The internet and its constellation of technologies, from search, social, e-commerce, and cloud computing, to SaaS, smartphones and digital advertising, has been a market in optimization over the past 20 years.

Periods of optimization reward methodical thinking, research, and polish. This is where mega corporations are born and specialist leaders are made. If you’re over the age of 35, this top half of the curve is what made you and me into “experts”. Our careers were built in an age where precision and rigor led to promotions and gains.

But one thing you should know about s-curves is that they don’t rise indefinitely. They plateau because the returns of optimization shrink as every efficiency has been squeezed, until a new innovation sparks the next curve.

Then the curve resets.

We have just arrived in a very different part of the curve, and the rules here are flipped.

When this curve starts over with a new market or innovation, the old dimensions that created success don’t apply anymore. We’re at the bottom again, this time defined by AI and the wave of new technologies that will spring from it or be amplified by it (robotics, augmented flow states, or other innovations that extend the brain as we explored in last week’s substack). AI is a platform technology, like electricity or the internet, with the power to rewire entire systems and spawn whole new industries.

At least the next 10 years will be all about exploration. Exploration can be seen as the polar opposite of optimization. It requires speed, reactivity, messiness, and brave (honestly brave) creativity. This is a very uncomfortable spot for experts like you and me because generally speaking, our expertise is no longer an advantage. The very things that made us successful in the top half of the curve are the things most likely to hold us back in the bottom.

There are no best practices here. No HBR article or AI guru knows more than you. The only way to find the rules and boundaries of this new market is to start experimenting widely. Every new experiment, no matter how farfetched or wasteful, starts to tell you more about the nature of this new curve better than all of your old, precise signals could tell you. Expertise has to be replaced by experimentation now.

This is why action equals information. Experimentation is the new research. Experimentation is the new data gathering. Remember that best practices, norms and rules only emerge in hindsight at the top of the curve, and we have a long way to go before we get there again.

Here’s another way of looking at it:

@jasmine_binaChase accuracy, not precision. One of the most important mental models we need to update is how we see ourselves as experts, because the target has moved. Think of information as darts, and the truth as a bullseye. Most of us have a cluster of information with lots of data darts all near each other. Surely if that much information is clustered in the same space, it must be correct, right? Except when the world is changing this fast (and it won’t slow down in our lifetimes), chances are all of those informational darts are nowhere near the true bullseye anymore. The bullseye has moved. Those clustered darts may be precise in their proximity to one another, and you may find plenty of proof of them, which is what makes you an expert, but they are no longer accurate. Your job now is to constantly be experimenting, testing, pushing, going wild and sideways with your explorations so that you can gather new, more accurate information that will get you closer to the new bullseye. Replace your expertise with an appetite for experimentation. Old rules and standards, established methodologies, best practices, they're just not going to work like they used to. Throw those darts as wide as you can. Experimentation needs to be operationalized within your company, and you have to act even if you are fearful or confused, because action is the only thing that will give you new data points. #leaders #leadership #growth #leadershipdevelopment #leadershipskills

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This is the hard reset we’re living through. Old rules, established methodologies, the security of polish and mastery can’t guide us as effectively as they used to. The best compass you have is action.

I think a lot of organizations misunderstand what this really means in practice.

It means experiments need to be operationalized. They have to be your default mode. You must act even if you’re fearful or confused, because only action produces the data points that will move you forward and up the curve.

Most organizations are not built for this. Mine certainly wasn’t, and me and my team decided to start climbing this curve 3 years ago. Three years of experiments, going wide, being shameless in the things we tried, and me really learning to swallow my pride when our experiments publicly failed. I learned that you have to stop seeing failure as failure, when in this new market failure is actually just new data (and if you still struggle with the cringe, read #5 in this list.) New data is extremely valuable right now.

Even though I thought we started climbing this curve 3 years ago, I can look back now and tell you the first year was me just fooling myself. I thought we were being brave and going wide, but in hindsight we were not. I was operating with the same rules I held so dearly at the top of the last curve.

The second year was better. It cost us a lot of money and time and pride, but it led us to fertile new territory. This most recent third year has felt even steeper in its learning curve, but I have never transformed so quickly as a person, builder or collaborator as I have in the last 12 months.

And only now do I feel like we are actually starting to see something on the horizon. Only now am I starting to get a sense of what this new market and world will be like, with no illusions that there isn’t a lot more left to learn. It has taken me and my team this long to not only operationalize experimentation at the very heart of our company, but make it a core part of my actual identity.

I always thought I was a big risk taker, and in some ways I always have been, but taking risks in a mature market simply requires smarts. Taking risks in an emerging market requires you to transform yourself.

This is the real directive under the mental model. We must change how we see ourselves. You have to become the experimenter, and that only happens with a lot of scrapes and bruises and getting back up when you slip down the slope.

Everything is becoming much more deeply connected (and if you want to see how deep it goes, I wrote about it here). When you look at the s-curve, you shouldn’t just be seeing a market. You should be seeing yourself.

You, too, will have to contort yourself into this shape if you want to make it to the top.

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Amazon Conflux

I’m giving a keynote on my upcoming report “Age of Potency” at Amazon’s Conflux conference this year, where they bring in their design, creative and brand teams from all over the world to explore the intersection of human creativity and AI. This is an internal event, so if you’ll be around, I’m excited to see you soon.

If not, no worries. I’ll be publishing my expanded “Age of Potency” report soon and can’t wait to share it with you. Stay tuned.

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Middle of Nowhere

Here's what we've been consuming.

The Most Popular Baby Name Every Year of the Last Century (History Facts): “Here is a fascinating look at the most popular girls’ and boys’ names of the last century, based on data collected by the U.S. Social Security Administration from Social Security card applications”… and what is most fascinating is just how much things have not changed over time.

Apocalyptic scents: The perfumes bottling the smell of societal collapse (Dazed): “Smells have a particularly unique way of tapping into emotion and memory, becoming almost like speculative fiction that can shake us into action. “The magic of fragrance is that it quite literally enters and becomes you chemically,” says Zegers. “Agar Olfactory came from a desire to activate a potential of communion with other species and with rapid technological shifts through that mechanism. And as a way to mourn and integrate these increasingly rapid shifts.””

Culture’s Center Has Shifted. The Charts Are the Receipts (Freeform Frequencies by Chris Lubin): “Hip Hop hasn’t disappeared. It’s everywhere and nowhere at once. Its sound, swag and style still drive the culture. But the center has shifted toward conservatism, and the charts are one CVS-long receipt of that. Maybe it’s not Hip Hop in decline. Maybe it’s America. The genre hasn’t run out of steam, the culture has. Conservatism owns the center, but the margins are alive. And that’s where the future always starts.”

The Cost of Contradiction (Past | Present | Future): “Imagination is essential as the antidote to inevitability. […] Uncertainty framed as risk is highly profitable. For some. For most of us, it has the effect of keeping us locked into the story that our natural instinct should be to resist change. That we should reach for the status quo even as it crumbles around us. Because the holy grail of “navigating” uncertainty is to get back to normal, even if we have to qualify it as a “new” normal.”

Only in my 40s am I starting to learn to play again, in great part due to building our community Exposure Therapy. And it’s fitting because our culture is also entering its play renaissance right now. It may look like chaos on the surface, but emerging experiments like...

Friendship Compounds
Psychedelic Spirituality
Communes and Mommunes
Living Funerals
Extreme Fandom
Goddess play
Margaritaville
Holistic Retreats
Tradlife
Cowboy Core
Theta Noir & AI Churches
Astrology Everything

.... these are all people playing with meaning. Play in its highest form.

I’ve never been good at playing. It makes me uncomfortable and awkward. I find it hard to let go of control and be messy or impulsive. But if you want to understand how you can make meaning for yourself in this new world, you need to take a serious look at how and when you play.

One place I can truly play is in community with my people in Exposure Therapy. We play here in many ways, and one of them is our dinners. Last weekend we gathered for our LA soiree “Tell Me Who You Really Are” at a beautiful, secluded ranch in Topanga Canyon, and these photos capture the deep and genuine playfulness of this group.

I think you reach a point as a strategist or creative where thinking and learning just isn’t enough anymore. You have to start feeling and embodying the world to really understand it... and that’s what play looks like for us.

Yours,

I’m Jasmine Bina, and I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:

• My private community Exposure Therapy is where my team and I share our best original research, have provocative conversations, special dinners, and lots of fun.

• My brand strategy agency Concept Bureau that works with some of the most powerful cultural brands in the world today.

• My LinkedIn where I post my ideas daily, before they turn into reports or articles. Come connect or follow me on TikTok and Instagram.

• My public speaking, where I bring my energy and enthusiasm to life with people who are deeply curious about culture, strategy, and the future.