Exponential Quotes

“The permission to wander around, imagine, ask questions, and challenge assumptions allows magic to happen and new possibilities to emerge.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption

“Instead of waiting for a system to coalesce into consistency, the successful actor must learn to operate in complex, uncertain, and ever-changing environments.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption

“In contrast to advice, our UN-VICE is not a suggestion of behavior or a mandate. Instead, our UN-VICE is a way to decipher changing circumstances imaginatively. All advice should be carefully considered, combined with an emphasis on developing and trusting our own capabilities.

In our increasingly UN-VICE world, the value of recommendations is rapidly decreasing. Systemic disruption has devalued ad-vice; instead, we offer our best UN-VICE. Inspired by Richard Feynman, we must explore unanswered questions, rather than adhering to unquestionable answers.

Zen Master Suzuki Roshi said “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” Our UN-VICE draws from the three stages of the Japanese martial arts concept shuhari. In the first stage, shu, the student masters the established fundamentals. In the second stage, ha, the learner practices and experiments with novel approaches, guided by their own unique perspectives. In the third stage, ri, they break loose from confining rulebooks to adapt freely to any situation. Shuhari is a journey, a continuous process of learning, experimenting, and letting go.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“Our world is facing new tensions, contradictions, complexities, and uncertainties. This new reality is the basis for our own version of VUCA, updated with two additional features: Intersecting and Exponential. In an UN-VICE world, these concepts are as important as UNknown, Volatile, and Complex. We must go beyond automatically relying on advice and start forming our own UN-VICE to survive. Proposing yet another acronym is risky - we hope the acronym police will be merciful.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“What is our UN-VICE in the context of Disruption 3.0?
To sum up, UN-VICE is an updated way of capturing the state of the world. Framing the dynamics of systemic disruption as UNknown, Volatile, Intersecting, Complex, Exponential enables an empowering response. We are not helpless victims unable to make decisions. With UN-VICE, we have the power to shape our own futures.

KEY POINTS: OUR UN-VICE ACRONYM

- UNknown: Uncertainty becomes our comfort zone. Recognize you can’t know anything perfectly and many decisions are based on assumptions. Increased uncertainty lowers the value of advice and requires increased self-reliance. Learn how to respond regardless of the lack of precedents.

- Volatile: Harness change for gain. Our world, and change itself, is evolving faster than ever before. Volatility is not new; we simply can’t ignore its impact. In volatility, we see the shifting speed and texture of the changing environment.

- Intersecting: Everything connects to everything else. The broader our lens, the greater the insights gained from realizing how boundaries are disappearing.

- Complex: Notice emergent properties and adapt. In complex environments, inputs do not map clearly to outputs. Practitioners must acknowledge emergent properties and reconcile the immediate with the indefinite. Such systems require critical thinking, experimentation, and judgment. Evaluate emerging issues, build resiliency, and learn to adapt to expanding complexity.

- Exponential: Pay attention to nonlinear types of change that increase in growth rate. Notice rapid acceleration of seemingly small shifts. Monitoring early on will mean fewer surprises.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“UN-VICE as a constant environment of the world:

The UN-VICE environment is an inherent constant. It is easier to imagine the world as predictable, but this world does not exist. Reality will continue to display UN-VICE features: UNknown, Volatile, Intersecting, Complex, Exponential.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“Many organizations and militaries use VUCA as an acronym to describe the disruptive state of the world, given its Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity.

UN-VICE is an updated way of capturing the state and velocity of the world, with our acronym for UNknown, Volatile, Intersecting, Complex, and Exponential:

- UNknown: Recognizing that you can’t know anything perfectly, and that many of our decisions are based on assumptions. Increased uncertainty lowers the value of ad-vice and requires increased self-reliance.

- Volatile: Our world, and change itself, is evolving faster than ever before. Volatility is not inherently good or bad; it is simply impactful. In volatility we see shifting speed, texture, and magnitude of the changing environment.

- Intersecting: The broader our filters, the more we realize that what we observe overlaps with other things. Boundaries are disappearing, connecting new areas through combinations.

- Complex: These more-than-complicated systems have unreliable input-output relationships and cannot be summarized or modeled without losing their essence. Unpredictable situations with unknown unknowns.

- Exponential: A nonlinear type of change that increases in its growth rate. To an observer, this change may happen gradually, then suddenly. Rapid acceleration of seemingly-small shifts.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“The ability of one to affect many is scaling exponentially — and it's scaling for good and it's scaling for evil.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“By our very nature, we humans are linear thinkers. We evolved to estimate a distance from the predator or to the prey, and advanced mathematics is only a recent evolutionary addition. This is why it’s so difficult even for a modern man to grasp the power of exponentials. 40 steps in linear progression is just 40 steps away; 40 steps in exponential progression is a cool trillion (with a T) – it will take you 3 times from Earth to the Sun and back to Earth.”
― Alex M. Vikoulov, The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, The Simulation Singularity & The Syntellect Emergence

“If you don't believe in God, then the God concept is a great placeholder for everything we don't know, which is exponentially more than we do know.”
― Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

“Exponential business growth comes from personal development.”
― Richie Norton

“In packet switching, on the other hand, the proliferation of paths in a growing network becomes a virtue: there are now that many more ways for data to flow, so the reliability of the network increases exponentially with its size.”
― Brian Christian, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

“The exponential growth is through innovations.”
― Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma, Modified Leadership