Consolation is commercially harmful. In dynamic, aggressive environments, consolation breeds entropy, erodes strategic distinctiveness, and dulls a enterprise’s skill to answer change. Conversely, discomfort is not only a catalyst for creativity, it’s a precondition for sustained profitability.
Mom Nature is aware of make life tough for herself. Take, for instance, the ponderosa pine tree, depending on wildfires for its heat-activated cones to open up and launch its seeds. Or the desert wildflower whose seed-coats have to be scarred by flash floods and abraded by stones to germinate. Or our native blackberries, which have to be totally consumed, solely in a position to proceed their lineage after being digested after which dumped elsewhere by passing fauna.
Fireplace. Flood. Feces. The welcome mat for brand spanking new life.
In his guide, Ghost Rider, drummer and author Neil Peart referred to as this the “ordeal of progress”. He sees it not as a metaphor, however a mechanism—a system constructed on struggling, the place discomfort isn’t an impediment, however the entry price of our continued existence.
And but, most companies appear hooked on the narcotic of incremental enchancment, with the language of consolation (alignment, concord, consensus) now changing the language of economic aggression.
All delicate lighting and scented candles. No burn. No friction. No spark.
The consolation entice
It’s comprehensible. Consolation feels protected and acquainted and predictable. Nevertheless it’s additionally commercially harmful. It breeds entropy, erodes distinctiveness, and dulls the power to answer change. It turns technique right into a recreation of middle-of-the-road rooster and creates organizations optimized for peace in a world more and more constructed on volatility.
Which is why each senior management crew ought to begin asking themselves a easy query: When was the final time one thing made us wince?
The absence of discomfort isn’t an indication of maturity, it’s an indication you’re now not alive in your market. That you just’ve settled for constructing technique and programs round minimizing ache, not maximizing potential. That you just’ve discovered the candy spot on the spreadsheet and pitched camp there.
However the market doesn’t give a toss how comfy your off-grid, wood-burning-stove-heated yurt is, as a result of each time you coast, anyone else is sprinting.
Amazon (a straightforward case examine, sure, however a profitable one) runs on discomfort. Their Day 1 tradition is designed to reject the false logic of security. Jeff Bezos describes Day 2 as: “Stasis. Adopted by irrelevance. Adopted by excruciating, painful decline. Adopted by loss of life.” Cheery bloke. Should be an actual asset to any banquet.
In fact, most companies aren’t constructed for Day 1. They’re constructed for quarter-by-quarter box-ticking, drowning out any discordant notes underneath the white noise of greatest follow.
Strategic discomfort doesn’t imply reckless—it means stressed. Disruption, for what it’s value, is simply what occurs when another person chooses discomfort sooner than you do. When another person burns the previous factor to make room for the brand new.
Artistic destruction
Economist Joseph Schumpeter famously described capitalism as a system of artistic destruction. And what may be extra uncomfortable than destruction? It means killing darlings and sacrificing sacred cows. Kodak knew digital was coming; they only couldn’t abdomen the wholesale abandonment of their previous income mannequin—so another person did it for them.
That’s the factor about discomfort. It’s not non-compulsory. The one alternative is whether or not you provoke it or react to it. There is no such thing as a impartial floor. There is no such thing as a protected zone. There’s solely ahead or decline.
In concept, companies know this. They learn the identical case research, quote the identical innovation audio system. and run the identical hackathons, full with beanbags, beers, and burritos.
However actual discomfort doesn’t appear to be that.
It appears like a pricing technique that provides your gross sales crew palpitations. It feels like a artistic concept that half the boardroom hates. It looks like launching one thing earlier than it’s totally baked, then watching the primary suggestions roll in like a intestine punch.
It appears like threat. And threat, in an age of threat administration, has been labelled irresponsible. Higher to appear to be everybody else and survive somewhat longer, avoiding discomfort, and with it, distinction.
In a world of generative slop and AI-cough-balled-lowest-common-denominator content material, standing out requires ache. You can’t optimize your technique to originality. You should leap, flail, flounder—and study.
Functionality vs. optionality
Which brings us to The Functionality Entice—a well-documented financial cycle that demonstrates that, when confronted with rising stress, organizations scale back funding in capability-building actions (like analysis and improvement, experimentation, or coaching).
You’ll hear it within the boardroom: “Let’s not distract the crew proper now. We are able to take a look at that subsequent quarter. Now isn’t the time to rock the boat.”
It’d sound rational within the second, however it’s devastating in the long term. Every utterance is a step deeper into the quicksand—a vote for urgency over technique—till the one factor you’re able to delivering is yesterday’s outcomes, simply with much less cash and fewer relevance.
As a substitute, maybe we have to lean extra into optionality.
Popularized by essayist and statistician, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, optionality is much less a tactic and extra a strategic stance—a structural mind-set about function when the longer term is unpredictable. It’s about constructing programs, groups, and types which are antifragile (i.e., not simply resilient underneath stress, but additionally in a position to enhance due to it).
For firms, this implies resisting the intuition to double down on what’s already identified and optimized, and making deliberate house for what’s unsure however probably transformative, as a substitute.
Small-scale product pilots, brand-side bets, experiments in new positioning or channels—all of them carry a excessive probability of irrelevance, and that’s exactly the purpose. The outcomes are uneven. Most will ship nothing, whereas a couple of could unlock disproportionate, uneven upside. However that upside solely turns into obtainable if the system is about as much as abdomen the draw back.
Meaning failure. Meaning noise. Meaning strolling into ambiguity on goal. Optionality doesn’t supply the consolation of certainty; it calls for a tolerance for discomfort. To echo Peart: It’s a must to be keen to go by means of shit. Actually.
Discomfort as a digestive system for innovation
Discomfort breaks issues down. It forces you to course of what’s actual and what’s wishful. It expels the inessential and fertilizes what comes subsequent. It’s disagreeable, however it’s additionally how something new will get made.
Advertising individuals usually speak about “bravery”, normally on the convention path after launching an A/B examined marketing campaign that audiences unilaterally liked. However we’re not storming barricades or going excessive right here—we’re bit gamers in an elaborate theatre of optimization. Bravery (such that it may possibly exist in advertising and marketing) is a finances allotted to one thing that may not work. It’s a model place that excludes. A product proposition that doesn’t enchantment to everybody, however means every thing to somebody.
Discomfort is the place worth lives. It’s previous the purpose of consensus, within the whisper of “I’m unsure about this”, and the stress between what works now and what may work subsequent.
Discomfort isn’t dysfunction; it’s construction, simply of a unique type. It’s the stress that produces higher pondering, the friction that sharpens the sting, the relentless push for fact.
So, right here’s the clarion name: Select the hearth. Select the flood. Select the abdomen acid. Select the shit. Select the concepts that threat backlash, the product that splits the room, the technique that makes your management crew’s sphincters’ contract. Select the factor that doesn’t really feel protected, as a result of protected is a commodity now.
And should you’re unsure whether or not you’re in a spot of discomfort, right here’s a clue: If everybody within the room agrees, you’re already late to the celebration.
Cowl picture: Yuliia Lakeienko
