Most decision -makers spend too long to scrutinize the movements of their competitors and too little to understand the tremors of the terrain under their feet. They seek to guess who will win the next round, when the real question is quite different: What if the rules of the game changed tomorrow?
This obsession with the ranking – winners and losers – is an inheritance of an industrial world where the markets were stable, the positions acquired, and the long cycles. But in the era of technological, cultural and climatic discontinuities, It is no longer the players who dictate the outcome of the game, but the very nature of the field.
The role of the strategist is not to predict that will triumph over others. It is Detect today’s truths that will become false tomorrow. Because it is at this specific location that the most significant opportunities are born – those which do not consist in beating the others, but making their victory obsolete.
Take the example of the luxury automobile. For decades, the identity of a brand like Ferrari or Lamborghini has rooted in the roar of its engines. This sound was not just a technical signature, it embodied an imaginary, symbolic power, an emotion. But what happens when this soundtrack disappears? When the electrical propulsion, silent in essence, replaces the mechanical explosion?
Ask the question “What to do if electric vehicles earn?”Rent to register in a logic of competition. Ask the question“What becomes of automotive luxury when the sound no longer exists?”Opens an infinitely richer field: that of the redefinition of codes, the creation of new emotional, sensory, identity standards.
The best strategists do not sacrify anything. They don’t cry the end of a world; They model the next. Their lucidity does not come from an excess of data, but from a rare capacity to detach from the established categories. They know that any company, even dominant, remains at the mercy of cultural shifts, technological reversals, changes in values.
This is why the real strategic question is never “Who will win?” but “What truths are we abandoning without knowing it?”. To question change means no longer thinking in terms of market share, but in terms of cultural dynamics, collective stories, emerging desires.
In this perspective, The competitor is only a secondary player. It is not him that you have to look at, it is the decor that changes all around. And if you manage to understand this decor before the others, you will no longer need to beat them: They will simply no longer play the right game.
