Surviving what's through the kaleidoscope

Every organisation has a survival threshold, and many don't know which side of it they're standing on. Fewer still have made the three decisions that shape their advantage when the terrain shifts: which trade-offs they will defend, which future they believe is coming, and what they'll sacrifice to hold together if it arrives differently than expected. This article is about those decisions.

Panic burns energy fast

The first thing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu teaches you is that panic burns energy fast.

The art was built on a simple strategic idea: if someone is bigger, stronger or more athletic than you standing up, don't stay standing. Change the terrain, close the distance, remove the advantages that make them dangerous, and create leverage instead.

But the first time someone pins you, your body wants to do one of two things: explode or freeze. Most beginners do both. They fight with everything until they're exhausted, or they stop moving because they can't yet see a way out.

Over time you learn there's always a next step. Pressure changes shape, and so does your advantage within it. Openings appear and disappear, and a movement that worked thirty seconds ago can suddenly create vulnerability somewhere else. So you stop treating pressure as a single thing and learn to read it: small adjustments, better positioning, and enough energy conserved to think clearly while the weight is still on you.

Different people develop different games. The smaller fighter often excels in leverage and angles, the heavier fighter in pressure and control, the long-limbed fighter in distance and timing. No one becomes strong everywhere.

Which advantages are worth protecting?

Years ago, my husband and I were both preparing for the world championship qualifiers. His division had around sixty competitors. Mine had three.

That sounds easier, and in some ways it was. But the strategic question underneath was completely different. In Jiu-Jitsu, advantage is rarely absolute. It's relational. Lighter athletes often have speed and endurance but struggle against sustained pressure. Heavier athletes create enormous pressure but tend to be slower and burn energy faster.

At around 1.80 metres and 80 kilos, my advantage came from the combination: a lot of strength and pressure, with reasonable speed, agility and endurance for my size. I could have cut weight and dropped a category, but that would have changed the shape of my game, trading away strength and the ability to dominate physically over time. The question wasn't simply how to compete. It was which advantages were worth protecting.

I won the qualifiers and went to the World Championships with broadly the same approach. But the environment had changed. My division now included someone well over 100 kilos who carried many of the same advantages I did, at an entirely different scale. I remember sitting in the corridors in Abu Dhabi, hearing some very large men whisper about how intimidating she was and how relieved they were she wasn't in their division. Then realising they were talking about mine.

I placed third that year, and the experience taught me something important. A strategy that creates advantage in one environment won't necessarily hold in another. I hadn't worked hard enough on what my advantage would be against her, and how to reduce hers.

Are you above the survival threshold?

There's a principle in competitive strategy that's been around long enough to become almost invisible: faster, better, cheaper. Pick two. You can't have all three.

It's a structural reality of how resource works. Speed costs quality or margin. Quality costs speed or price. Low cost costs depth or craft. Every organisation sits somewhere inside that triangle, whether it chose its position consciously or not.

Many organisations, particularly in the for-purpose sector, haven't chosen. They've drifted, accumulating advantages the way organisations accumulate initiatives: because each made sense at the time, because a funder asked, because it felt wrong to say no, or because customers couldn't afford it otherwise. The result is an attempt to be fast, cheap and excellent all at once, spreading limited resource across every channel rather than pulling it behind one clear direction. That's exhaustion with a thin budget line.

A word for organisations thinking "we don't have competitors". That may be true today, but a gap that needs filling will always attract something to fill it, or you may find the gap no longer needs filling. "Us or nothing" is a temporary condition. Organisations that mistake it for safety tend to discover their real competition only once it has already taken the ground.

Which moat are you building?

Kerry Huang of AwaCourage draws a useful line between the survival threshold and the competitive moat.* Survival is faster, better or cheaper. The moat is where durable advantage forms, across three dimensions: tougher (resilience and governance), greener (sustainability and long-arc impact) and smarter (data, insight and adaptive capability).

Each one attracts investment and signals credibility, and that's exactly the problem. Boards and funders keep adding to the list: a resilience workstream, a data strategy, a sustainability commitment, a technology transformation, a wellbeing framework. All important. But if everything is a strategic priority, nothing is.

Choosing your moat means backing a future. It means looking at the plausible futures forming on the horizon and making a call: this one is more likely, this advantage will matter more in that world, so we are going here. That choice closes other paths, and that's the point. Closed paths force depth, and depth compounds into capability that competitors can't replicate with capital alone.

Closed paths carry risk too. A different future may arrive with a different defining challenge, and you'll need to adjust your moat or build a new one. You need to see that coming, and you need enough glue as an organisation to recalibrate without fragmenting. The organisations that stall are the ones holding too many dimensions open at once, because the uncertainty feels too great to choose. Avoiding the decision. Going deep on nothing.

The kaleidoscope doesn't warn you before it turns

If strategy is how we overcome the challenges standing between us and our aspirations, our advantages are what we use to overcome them. The kaleidoscope is how we look into the future, where our aspirations and our future challenges both live.

The pieces inside stay fairly familiar: funding pressure, workforce strain, technology shifts, public expectation, competition, trust. But as we move through the present, the image turns and the pattern changes. A growth challenge becomes a survival challenge. Something operational becomes cultural. Something manageable becomes existential. Sometimes the kaleidoscope turns far enough to show a shape we've never seen before.

When that happens, the strengths that mattered in one environment don't always matter in the next. Scale can weaken intimacy. Efficiency can weaken resilience. Growth can weaken coherence.

That's why building your moat isn't a one-off decision made at a planning day and laminated on the wall. It's a commitment held firmly and lightly: firmly enough to go deep, lightly enough to revisit when the challenge has shifted and the moat you built for one future may not suit the one actually arriving. The question at that moment isn't "were we wrong to choose?" It's "given who we are and where we're heading, what does this new terrain require of us?"

The discipline of leadership isn't becoming strongest everywhere at once. It's understanding which strengths are worth protecting for the future you're moving toward, and staying clear-eyed enough to know when that future has changed.

Reflection

• Survival: faster, better, cheaper. Which two does your organisation actually back right now, in its decisions, resource and time? If you're not sure, that's the answer.
• Moat: tougher, greener, smarter. Which one are you building toward, and is it the right one for the future you think is most likely?
• Glue: if the kaleidoscope turned and a different future arrived, could your organisation recalibrate without fragmenting?

The gap between the moat you think you're building and the one your decisions are actually constructing is your strategy conversation.

The discipline of leadership isn't becoming strongest everywhere at once. It's knowing which strengths are worth protecting.