“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”
Or – The Red Queen Effect.
One of my all-time favorite book is Lewis Carrol’s – Through the Looking Glass
The Red Queen Effect is based on the character in the book who schools Alice when she finds herself running faster and faster but staying in the same place.
“It refers to the increased pressure to adapt faster just to survive, is driven by an increase in the evolutionary pace of rival technology solutions”
What does this mean for us?
Rather than run harder, the article recommends it would be nice to run smarter.
Here are three of the ways we can try to avoid the Red Queen.
#1 Invest in learning and adding real-world value to people.
This is not a popular path as it’s incredibly expensive in time and money. Standing still, however, is more expensive.
If we fail to keep getting better, we won’t exist.
#2 Spend our limited mental resources working on things that won’t change next week – i.e mental models which explain how the world works. Ex – First principles or playing with Integrity
#3 Acknowledge ‘how the world works and not how we want it to work’
Check out the examples of the red queen effect in medicine, evolution and business in the link in comments.
#reviewswithranjani
Source –
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/red-queen-effect#:~:text=2.3.,Barnett%20and%20Hansen%2C%201996)
[2] https://fs.blog/2012/10/the-red-queen-effect/