Thinking Space

A lot of time we confuse the exponential change with linear rate of change, though initially; an exponential change may look like the liner change but if you are late to understand it you might be too late to act on it.

A beautiful fable captures the power of exponential change.

In ancient China, a man came to the emperor and demonstrated to him his invention of the game of chess. The emperor was so impressed by the brilliance of the man’s invention that he told the man to name his reward. The man asked for his reward in an amount of rice —that one grain be placed on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and so on —doubling the number of grains on each subsequent square. Not being a very good mathematician, the emperor at first thought the reward to be too modest and directed his servants to fulfil the man’s request. By the time the rice grains filled the first half of the chessboard, the man had more than four billion rice grains —or about the harvest of one rice field. At that point the man was rich. By the time the servants got to the sixty-fourth square, the man had more than eighteen quintillion rice grains (18 x10¹⁸), or more than all the wealth in the land. But his wealth and ability to outsmart the emperor came with a price —he ended up being decapitated.

In this example, the emperor had the power to decapitate the person but your organisation may not have that power to kill the competition.

Prepare yourself for an exponential change or at least develop the capability to identify it, before it’s too late.