In Good to Great, Jim Collins tells the story of the chicken and the egg:
Picture an egg just sitting there. No one pays it much attention until, one day, the egg cracks open and out jumps a chicken!
All the major magazines and newspapers jump on the event, writing feature stories—“The Transformation of Egg to Chicken!” “The Remarkable Revolution of the Egg!” “Stunning Turnaround at Egg!”—as if the egg had undergone some overnight metamorphosis, radically altering itself into a chicken.
But what does it look like from the chicken’s point of view?
It’s a completely different story. While the world ignored this dormant-looking egg, the chicken was evolving, growing, developing, incubating. From the chicken’s point of view, cracking the egg is simply one more step in a long chain of steps leading up to that moment—a big step, to be sure, but hardly the radical, single-step transformation it looks like to those watching from outside the egg.
It's a silly analogy. But it's useful to grasp how “the one big thing,” the magic instant that everything changes, is actually a gradual process. Collins et al found that none of the executives from the hot companies they studied could pinpoint one thing or instance of transition.
Another way to say this is that change happens gradually, and shows up all of a sudden. Dramatic and revolutionary on the outside. Organic on the inside. Like the chick. This concept became known as the flywheel effect. “A flywheel is an underlying, compelling logic of momentum.”
Amazon's flywheel turned the company from retailer to tech company.
Amazon figured out the initial drivers of its business, then iterated relentlessly. Through this kind of big picture thinking and narrative clarity, Bezos built a strong culture where people who are right a lot, listen a lot. Today's Amazon still capitalizes on those initial drivers.
Once you build the infrastructure to deliver your thing, self-reinforcing loops are very powerful. But without the drivers that make sense for you and weak commitment to infrastructure, you end up with lots of cracked shells and no chicken.
The role of loops
The image above is that of a classic feedback loop. A feedback loop is useful to understand which things you're doing work to get you closer to your goals. You have an action that provides evidence. Relevance drives consequence.
You can create different kinds of loops to figure out what's going on. In growth marketing terms, loops provide sustainable compounding growth. Through a process, inputs generate more of an output that can be reinvested in the input. They change how you make decisions.
Due to the speed of change, many companies have started to adopt the OODA loop or observe–orient–decide–act instead of the classic plan-do-study-act. Noting that strategy never survives the first contact with the enemy, military strategist and United States Air Force Colonel John Boyd applied OODA to combat.
Online, you can create a loop with different media assets. For example, a personal account tests ideas. Once you found an idea that works, you publish a refined version in a company account. Then create a separate account for short, cut-to-the-chase summaries. This account promotes your work in another way. Each account feeds the others, in a loop, and sends people to places where they can learn more, then buy a product.
Working in public works, because your have your specific flywheel that makes your system on the business side work. Creators are starting to use these models that combine marketing, product, and innovation.
Bezos understood the opportunities and issues of the Internet. He applied strategic thinking in the flywheel to build Amazon, growing the company through loops designed directly into the platform. There's a tremendous advantage in owning your feedback loop. It's like list building for. your business.
In the beginning, the idea and traction matter more than the tools. But the tools became critical to keep momentum. Because people come for the novelty, but stay for the experience. And if you're hobbled by bad integration, it will cost you more in terms of energy, to just stay in place.
If we had better platforms for community builders, we would also have better communities. Contrary to unspoken assumption, social media companies are running their own business, and are not a public service.
Conversations have feedback loops. Talking is action, listening is evidence, desire to continue is relevance, and energy is the consequence.