For the first time in human history, the world is too complex to predict and too fast to adapt to. In this Complex New World, the possibilities of what might happen tomorrow, next month, next year have exploded. Predicting the future is broken, and by the time we adapt, the world will change twice over. We need a different strategy.
In this post, we'll see why the path to resilience lies not in what's changing, but in what isn't. And why finding it is something only humans can do, even in this AI-first world.
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When asked what's going to change in the next 10 years, Jeff Bezos said he's hardly ever asked what isn't going to change. For him, that's the more interesting question, because you can build a strategy around the things that are stable in time.
No matter the state of the economy or the identity of the president, says Bezos, people will want low prices, vast selection, and fast delivery. When you know something is true even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it. To this day, these three elements make up the core of Amazon's strategy and identity. Bezos didn't predict the future. He embraced the unchanging.
Until now, we dealt with change by weathering the storm and waiting for it to pass. We built for the calm that always came next. Now we can't. Now, everywhere you look, the change never stops. And since no calm is coming, we build for the turbulence that's here to stay.
But how do you find these unchanging elements? And how do you know they're the right ones for you?
At any given moment, there is an infinite number of things around you that do not change. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Gravity pulls you towards the earth. The global population is growing. Unchanging elements are everywhere you look. Most of them are irrelevant and hold no value to you. But a few could be the foundation of your strategy and identity.
Copying someone else's is tempting. You could build around Amazon's three elements, but Amazon already owns them. The elements that anchor you need to be yours.
Machines can't help you find your elements. Machines are great at logic and data. AI excels at looking at what is known. But making sense of this complex new world is different. Nothing like this complexity has existed before. This is uncharted territory for humans and machines alike. There is no recorded data, no recognized patterns, nothing for machines to draw on or learn from. Spotting the right unchanging elements for you requires something machines don't have.
Virgilio Martinez, one of the world's top chefs, built his whole menu on something that will never change. He wanted to serve Peru's true identity on a plate, not just its cuisine but what the country truly is. The answer came to him when he traveled the land, researched ingredients and communities, and learned of an Andean philosophy that sees the world differently. Not horizontally, but vertically, in different regions and levels.
Peru's true identity, Martinez realized, reveals itself through its altitude. From the sea to the mountaintops, each level with its own ingredients, knowledge, and culture. An unchanging truth that shaped everything he served.
Martinez didn't find altitude in a dataset. He used his intuition instead. Thomas Campbell, a former NASA physicist who has spent decades studying how the mind processes information, argues that intuition is more powerful than intellect. "The questions and the things we want to know that are really important", says Campbell, "there's no data that you can put in to come to a logical conclusion".
Where data isn't available, the mind can intuit the way forward. But machines don't have intuition. They are like "a thousand left brains". Finding your unchanging elements isn't a left-brain problem, it's a right-brain one. And that is something only humans can do.
But how do we tap this intuition? And how do we find our own unchanging elements?
To go deeper, read Positive Constraint — the idea this one grows from.