Inertia can increase the longer you hold on to your beliefs. If you’re like most people, many of your core political, religious, and social beliefs can be traced to the family and geographic culture in which you were raised as a child. Have you reevaluated these views recently? If not, you are likely clinging to many beliefs that are in conflict with other beliefs you came to hold later, or that you never properly questioned. The more inertia you have, the more resistant you will be to changing these beliefs, and the less likely you will be to adapt your thinking when you need to.
Think about how scientific theories change over time, but how old “facts” still persist. When our parents were in school, they weren’t taught about how an asteroid led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, because that theory wasn’t put forth until 1980. And now, forty years later, this widely accepted asteroid theory has come under increased scrutiny in terms of how large a role it actually played in causing the mass extinction. Something different may very likely be in textbooks decades from now.
Have you heard that the latest research indicates that Tyrannosaurus rex had a form of feathers over parts of its body? Or that the war on saturated fat and dietary cholesterol that loomed large when we were kids in the 1980s has been completely revised, and now whole milk and eggs are thought to be part of a healthy diet? It can be hard to change old habits and beliefs once they are so ingrained, even if you now know them to be flawed. We are of course aware of both of these revisions, but still the image that comes to mind when we hear about T. rex is not that of a feathered dinosaur, and we still take pause at the idea of eating eggs every day.
Organizations face a similar danger because of inertia. A long-term commitment to an organizational strategy creates a lot of inertia toward that strategy. This inertia can lead to suboptimal decisions, referred to as a strategy tax. For example, most people would like to reduce their online footprint and be tracked less by advertisers. As a result, web browsers have incorporated more privacy features. For example, in 2017, Apple’s Safari browser introduced a feature called Intelligent Tracking Prevention, which attempts to prevent ads from following you around the internet. However, we expect that Google will not add a feature like this to its Chrome browser, because Google itself is the company tracking you on most sites, since its long-term strategy is to dominate online advertising. Since Google tracks you, it can sell advertisers the ability to follow you around the internet with its ads.
Google’s strategy of being the world’s biggest advertising company requires it to pay the tax of not adding significant anti-tracking features to its browser, since doing so would counteract that strategy. Apple does not have to pay this tax since it does not have such a strategy.
Politicians and political parties create strategy tax when locking themselves into a long-term position. For example, the U.S. Republican Party has staked out a position that opposes climate change mitigation, with many politicians denying that man-made climate change is even taking place. As the negative effects of man-made climate change are becoming clearer through increased catastrophic weather incidents, this strategy tax may start to cost politically.
Reversing course once a strategy tax is established can be even more costly. In 1988, George H. W. Bush delivered this famous line at the Republican Party’s national convention: “Read my lips: no new taxes.” Later, this commitment caused significant problems for him when he faced a recession as president. Ultimately, Bush decided he had to break his pledge and raise taxes, and it cost him reelection.
The lesson here is that you should, as much as possible, avoid locking yourself into rigid long-term strategies, as circumstances can rapidly change. What strategy taxes are you currently paying?
A model related to the strategy tax is the Shirky principle, named after economics writer Clay Shirky. The Shirky principle states, Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. An illustrative example is TurboTax, a U.S. company that makes filing taxes easier, but also lobbies against ideas that would make it easier to file taxes directly with the government. For example, “return-free filing,” a system in which the government would send you a pre-filled form based on information it already has available, would work well for most people. It is already a reality in some countries, saving time and money for millions. Yet TurboTax fights against the adoption of such a program because it wants tax filing to continue to be complex, since it is the solution to that problem.
Sometimes a person or department will try to preserve an inefficient process, even when a new idea or technology comes around that can make things easier. Think of the stodgy person at your office or school who is always talking about the “way it’s always been done,” constantly anxious about change and new technology. That person embodies the Shirky principle. You do not want to be that person.
Inertia in beliefs and behaviors allows entrenched ideas and organizations to persist for long periods of time. The Lindy effect is the name of this phenomenon. It was popularized by Nassim Taleb in his book Antifragile, which we mentioned in Chapter 1. Taleb explains:
If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years. This, simply, as a rule, tells you why things that have been around for a long time are not “aging” like persons, but “aging” in reverse. Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy. This is an indicator of some robustness. The robustness of an item is proportional to its life!
The Lindy effect applies to technologies, ideas, organizations, and other nonperishable things. Assuming that the thing in question is not falling out of favor, the longer it endures, the longer you can expect it to further endure.
The Lindy effect explains the continued relevance of Shakespeare and the Beatles. Since they show no signs of falling out of favor, the Lindy effect tells us we can expect Shakespeare plays to be performed for at least another four hundred years, and Beatles songs to be heard for at least another fifty.
Of course, things can and do eventually become unpopular, and there is another mental model to describe the point at which something’s relevance begins to decline. This model is peak, as in peak sexism, peak Facebook. This concept was actually popularized with oil, as peak oil is usually defined as the point in time when the maximum amount of oil is being extracted from Earth. After peak oil, the decline may be a slow one, but it will have begun, with oil production falling each year instead of rising.
People have predicted peak oil many times. As far back as 1919, David White, the chief geologist of the U.S. Geological Survey, predicted in “The Unmined Supply of Petroleum in the United States” that the U.S. “peak of production will soon be passed, possibly within three years.” Many similar predictions have come and gone, and peak oil has still not occurred. What has happened instead is that increased demand has driven innovation in how to get more oil out of the ground, continually increasing yearly production.
Now, though, a better argument for peak oil is starting to form as the oil market’s underlying structure is proving to be unhealthy. The effects of climate change are looming. Solar energy is quickly becoming cost-competitive with oil on a global scale. Increasing cost-competitiveness of electric cars and the advent of autonomous vehicles and ride-sharing services are threatening to collapse the car and truck markets as we know them. All of these have the potential to create lasting effects on the oil market.
Whether you are a market observer or a market participant, these structural changes are worth considering when you’re thinking about a possible new reality for the oil market. Should your next car be electric? Should you buy another car at all?
More generally, the Lindy effect and peak concepts can help you assess any idea or market opportunity and better predict how it might unfold. Is the market healthy? Has it already reached its peak? How long has it been around? Remember,
markets that have been around a long time have more inertia. And the healthier the market is, the more difficult it will be to change.
In fact, something with a lot of inertia, even after its peak, can take an extremely long time to decline. Over the past decade, consumers have read fewer physical newspapers and have been “cutting the cord” with cable, yet plenty of newspapers and cable subscriptions are still sold and will continue to be sold for decades to come. Similarly, fax machines, video rental stores, and dial-up internet feel like relics of the nineties, but people still send plenty of faxes, and, as of the time of this writing, in late 2018, there still exists a Blockbuster video store in Bend, Oregon, and more than a million people still use AOL dial-up! As Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) said, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
U.S. Newspaper Circulation
Momentum is a model that can help you understand how things change. Momentum and inertia are related concepts. In physics, momentum is the product (multiplication) of mass and velocity, whereas inertia is just a function of mass. That means a heavy object at rest has a lot of inertia since it is hard to move, but it has no momentum since its velocity is zero. However, a heavy object gets momentum quickly once it starts moving. The faster an object goes, the more momentum it has. However, its inertia remains the same (since its mass remains the same), and it is still similarly difficult to change its velocity.
To relate the concept to a real-world example, sending faxes is continually losing momentum. However, the act still has a lot of inertia since the technology is entrenched in many business processes. As a result, the momentum behind sending faxes decreases very slowly.
In your life, you can take advantage of this concept by seeking out things that are rapidly gaining momentum. For example, you could join an organization that is just starting to take off or start a new organization that leverages an innovative technology or idea that is beginning to go mainstream. In Chapter 3, we discussed the benefits of focusing on high-leverage activities to make the most out of your time. Activities associated with organizations or ideas with high and increasing momentum are very often high-leverage, because your efforts get amplified by the momentum.
Similarly, creating inertia by entrenching beliefs and processes in others is also a high-leverage activity. Once they are established, those beliefs or processes will be difficult to unwind, persisting for a long time. Think about those beliefs from childhood that we spoke about earlier and how hard they are to let go.
In an organizational context, establishing such beliefs and norms is the act of creating culture, which we will explore more fully in Chapter 8. Here, though, consider the relation of culture to inertia embodied in this saying: Culture eats strategy for breakfast. It is a warning that if you embark on a strategy that is in opposition to your organization’s culture, which has much more inertia than even its strategy, it is very unlikely to succeed.
For example, in 2013 the U.S. government embarked on a strategy to create a website where citizens could directly apply for healthcare coverage. The website, HealthCare.gov, was to be made available on October 1, 2013, though unlike major technology firms, the U.S. government does not have a culture attuned to creating mainstream websites on a deadline. This culture/strategy mismatch was obvious when the government botched the launch of HealthCare.gov. In the first week of operations, only a small percentage of those interested were able to enroll. A strike team was assembled to fix the website, filled with top talent from major tech firms, a group steeped in a culture better matched to this strategy.
Quite simply, to be successful you need your organization’s culture to align with its strategy. As an organizational leader, you must recognize if there is a mismatch and act accordingly. As the U.S. government eventually did, you could create a new team with a different culture more fit for the strategy. You could abandon the strategy or pursue a modified strategy more aligned with the existing culture. Or you could try to change the culture over time, steering it toward the desired long-term strategy, recognizing that it may be a slow and challenging process.
In new organizations, you have the opportunity to mold the culture toward long-term strategic directions. However, consider that the world can rapidly change around you. It follows, then, that you eventually may have to rapidly change your organization’s strategy as well. Consequently, the best organizational culture in many situations is one that is highly adaptable, just as it is recommended for people themselves to be highly adaptable. That is, you likely want to craft an organizational culture that can readily accept new strategies or processes. A culture like this is agile, willing to experiment with new ideas, not tied down to existing processes.
The good news is that if you can establish inertia and momentum in an adaptable culture, or in any context really, it can have staying power. A mental model that captures this process well is the flywheel, a rotating physical disk that is used to store energy. Flywheels are still used in many industrial applications, though a more relatable example to get the concept is a children’s merry-go-round. It takes a lot of effort to get a merry-go-round to start spinning, but once it is spinning, it takes little effort to keep it spinning.
Flywheel
Nonprofit marketing expert Tom Peterson credits the flywheel model for the growth of the global anti-poverty nonprofit Heifer International from $3 million in revenue in 1992 to $90 million in 2008. In the 1970s, Heifer International created its gift catalog fundraising concept, encouraging people to give a gift like a goat or water buffalo to a family in need in order to make them more self-reliant. With Peterson’s help, Heifer improved the catalog each year, running dozens of experiments through changes to its look, contents, production, distribution, and publicity. This constant testing and experimentation helped the company’s revenue grow a little bit each year, never slowing down. It has continued to sustain higher and higher levels through today.
In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins relates many similar examples, using the flywheel metaphor to summarize how companies systematically and incrementally go from good to great.
The flywheel image captures the overall feel of what it was like inside the companies as they went from good to great. No matter how dramatic the end result, the good-to-great transformations never happened in one fell swoop. There was no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no wrenching revolution. Good to great comes about by a cumulative process—step by step, action by action, decision, turn by turn of the flywheel—that adds up to sustained and spectacular results.
An example of a flywheel in everyday life is how it takes a lot of time and practice to become an expert on a topic, but once you are an expert it takes only minimal effort to remain on top of new developments in the field. On a shorter time scale, any personal or professional project can be viewed from the perspective of a flywheel. It is slow when you get started on the project, but once you gain some momentum, it seems easier to make progress. And as we discussed in Chapter 3, when we multitask, we never get enough momentum on any one task for it to start to feel easier. Instead, we are constantly spending energy starting and restarting the wheel rather than taking advantage of its momentum once we get it to start spinning.
The flywheel model tells you your efforts will have long-term benefits and will compound on top of previous efforts by yourself and others. It’s the tactical way to apply the concepts of momentum and inertia to your advantage.
On the other hand, trying to change something that has a lot of inertia is challenging because of the outsized effort required. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth the effort, but you should go in with eyes wide open, knowing that it can be difficult and time-consuming. If you do decide to try enacting such a change, there are several useful models to aid you in your quest.
First, from biology, there is homeostasis, which describes a situation in which an organism constantly regulates itself around a specific target, such as body temperature. When
you get too cold, you shiver to warm up; when it’s too hot, you sweat to cool off. In both cases, your body is trying to revert to its normal temperature. That’s helpful, but the same effect also prevents change from the status quo when you want it to occur.
In general, societies, organizations, families, and individuals usually exhibit homeostasis around a set of core cultural values or metrics that relate to the status of the group. Doing so ensures their self-preservation (or so they think). For example, in the U.S., attempts at campaign finance reform have continually failed as lobbying groups have found new and innovative ways to react to regulations, and they continue to infuse their money into politics.
On a more mundane scale, within organizations or communities, people often naturally resist change, regularly responding with the mantra “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” “Don’t rock the boat,” or “That’s how we do things around here.” This reaction can be rationalized and justified because change can be disruptive, even if the proposed end state has attractive benefits.
In our kids’ school district right now, there is a debate about changing the school start times based on solid research showing that teenagers do better with later start times. However, moving school times causes a decent amount of disruption to various pockets of the community, and would require many families and teachers to adjust their schedules and arrangements, such as for childcare. If the goal is to achieve the best educational outcome for the students, the data shows that start times should be moved, though the reaction to protect the status quo is nevertheless understandable.
Unfortunately, as a result of these types of homeostatic reactions, we stay in suboptimal arrangements for too long, from toxic personal relationships to poor organizational processes, all the way up to ineffective government policies. When you fight homeostasis—in yourself or in others—look out for the underlying mechanisms that are working against your efforts to make changes.
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