Come What May

Existential threats do not always RSVP.

Competitors shift, customers drift, a co-founder wakes up and quits. I invest in founders. Disruption is the game, there is no fallback plan. The only way through is to make sense of the chaos, stack up lead bullets, and step forward.

I learned range early. Odd weekends with cousins who were living the hard edge of policy, weekdays in classrooms with the children of the people writing that policy. Later it was three countries, four languages. Code-switching was not theatre, it was survival, and it taught me something simple: complexity is not solved, it is managed. Heraclitus had a point. Everything flows. If life keeps changing state, the winning response is not to build the prettiest statue, it is to learn to move with the river. Adaptability > aesthetics.

Ashby’s Law gives that instinct a frame. The system with the widest set of responses controls the situation. If your environment throws ten types of problem and you can answer only five, you lose control. You have seen this in the wild. You type into a support chatbot, it does fine on simple queries, then your situation gets messy and it punts you to a human. That handoff is the system admitting its internal variety does not match external complexity. Every escalation is leakage. Now imagine a future system with a far wider repertoire. Whether we call it AGI or just better engineering, more range means fewer punts, which is why this line of progress matters.

Darwin said survival favours the ones who fit their environment. In practice that often means the most adaptable rather than the strongest. Ashby explains the mechanics of that adaptability. Either increase your variety, more tools and plays, or simplify your environment, fewer moving parts, cleaner rules. Often it is both. In my world, that shows up as two habits: learn new moves quickly and write reality down so scope is honest. Write to think clearly, scope to plan honestly, adapt to stay alive.

I have watched adaptability fail in quieter places than boardrooms. Harry, a friend, believed someone special when she said she would reach out when she was ready. Five months passed in silence. People called him naïve. He was not naïve, he was rigid. He could not model a world where her silence had nothing to do with him. Most of us were never taught to hold ambiguity without forcing a neat ending. Range would have helped. What else could be true? What if I misread it? Adaptability in relationships is not detachment, it is the grace to run more than one mental model.

Business gives you louder case studies. Kodak invented the digital camera and clung to film. They protected the old environment instead of widening their responses. Amazon looked at retail chaos and kept adding moves, logistics, delivery, software, new markets, while simplifying the parts they could standardise. One shrank its variety and lost control. The other expanded it and found leverage. If your spouse suggests introducing a third person for the sake of variety, however, Kodak’s conservatism might be the correct strategy. Unless… anyway.

Closer to home, one company I back, call it Suit, exists because cross-border trade in Africa is organised chaos. The job is to build a product with enough range to handle regulators, banks, logistics and human habits, while quietly simplifying the path so good behaviour is the default. That is Ashby as a mandate, not a metaphor.

And then there are the days when there is no clever sidestep, only work. Ben Horowitz tells the story twice, first at Netscape and later at Opsware. Faster rivals, lost deals, board pressure. The temptation was to pivot around the pain. The lesson was colder: there are no silver bullets, only lead bullets. Fix the core product, face the big guard at the front door, go through him. I have had to repeat that sentence to teams and to myself. It is not romantic, but it is reliable.

I shared a draft of this idea at my club. Seven of eight friends brought up Pareto. Focus on the few things that drive most of the result. They are not wrong. But focus without range is brittle. If the world shifts the levers, laser focus on yesterday’s 20 percent is just stubbornness. The synthesis is the move. Focus on what matters, build enough variety to adapt when what matters changes.

To the streets: I see you. The code-switchers. I admire how well you move, I am sorry that you have to. Range is a tax, and it is a superpower.

Come what may, that is the work. Write things down so your scope is honest. Build the right building blocks so revenue, when it comes, is durable and growing. Add responses where you lack them. Simplify where you can. And when there is no trick and no shortcut, reach for the lead bullets. Control does not come from rigidity. It comes from adaptability, earned in public, one decision at a time.