The Fog of War is invoked to describe the uncertainty that permeates combat operations. This term is generally attributed to a quote by Clausewitz: “The great uncertainty of all data in war is a peculiar difficulty, because all action must, to a certain extent, be planned in a mere twilight, which in addition not infrequently — like the effect of a fog or moonshine — gives to things exaggerated dimensions and unnatural appearance.” (via wikipedia).
The evolution of an innovation or innovative company faces a similar fog. At any point in time, we extrapolate from current conditions a set of possible future outcomes and take action to try to bring the best outcome into being. In one view, we should make economically rational decisions, those that maximize our expected return over the outcomes weighted by their likelihood.
However, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “The Black Swan” argues convincingly us that the seeds of disruption and destruction lie in events that exist outside all reasonable extrapolations of a current state of affairs. The occurrence of a highly improbable event is, in fact, inevitable.
Since we can’t know anything for sure, innovators have to operate at a completely different level than analysts. It’s a chess game where the rules can change mid-play forcing a complete re-evaluation of strategy. For example, the iPhone was a Black Swan to the cellular industry, as this analyst’s perspective shows. This dynamnic is why you should ignore Forrester and other analysts – they tell you what the world will be like if nothing surprising happens, but surprising things always happen.
