Author: Franz Malten Buemann

Entrenched cultural organizations and icons feel more permanent than they are. Network effects, brand power and the status quo can seduce us into believing that we’re stuck with what we have, but things are rarely as permanent as they appear.

James Bond is bloated and dated. Idris Elba deserves the role, but that’s unlikely to happen. But Netflix could create a competitor, start with the old playbook but build something new, something more modern.

College accreditation leads to bureaucracies and huge costs. But new ways of delivering learning can upend a hundred years of a dominant system.

The Olympics and FIFA are corrupt and built on old models of media and geography. New ways of organizing and amplifying talent could create a powerful force for change.

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter seem like they will last forever. Until they don’t.

Nothing much changes until someone cares enough to build an alternative.

You may have noticed that when you eventually find something, it’s in the last place you looked. Mostly because after that, you stop looking.

And when a long-awaited moment finally arrives, the respite comes just in time, when we’re at the end of our rope. That’s largely because if we give up before then, it never arrives, and because we can probably stick things out longer than we’d like to believe.

Waiting for the hero to save us just in time isn’t nearly as productive as realizing that we have agency. We have the agency to quit when it makes sense to quit (ignoring sunk costs) and we have the agency to dig in deeper when it really matters (acknowledging that it might not work).

When help does arrive, just in time, it’s worth celebrating.

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