“No plan survives contact with the enemy”, part one

What I discovered in the writing of the book

In the final chapter of the book, when talking about the second phase of transformations, encapsulated experiences, I wrote this paragraph:

Few transformations, however, follow a nice, monotonically increasing path (which is why “journey” really is the right term). There are ups and downs, advances and retreats, progression and regression. As the old military saying has it, no plan survives contact with the enemy, and when it comes to transformations – metamorphic ones in particular – there are enemies within and without individual aspirants, even more so for the collective aspirants of organizations, businesses, and communities.

And that old military saying applies to the writing journey as well! The oft-used quote is a paraphrase most famously attributed to Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, a Prussian field marshal and strategist from the 19th century. But as boxer Mike Tyson put it in today’s vernacular, “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth”.

In today’s context, it means that the book I finished was not the same book I started out to write! It’s not that the reader is the enemy, nor the editor or publisher – and certainly not you, my Substack readers! No, the “enemy” with every book is what I do not yet know about the subject. And as the late Donald Rumsfeld, former secretary of defense, famously put it, for me there are both known unknowns and unknown unknowns. In this post where be able to read about ideas and frameworks across the entire book, I’ll focus on the latter, the unknown unknowns of my writing.

Writing as Discovery

In the welcome message you received when you subscribed to my Substack I wrote of why I started to write this book:

So people have been asking me for over 20 years when I was going to write a full book on the Transformation Economy. My response was always twofold: I don’t know enough about transformations, and the world isn’t ready for it.

Those statements are no longer true.

When you read the book in full, you’ll see why that was the case. But just because I knew enough about transformations to start the book doesn’t mean I knew enough to finish the book.

It’s been the same with all my books. I intentionally put items in the outline that I do not know much about but do know I need to figure out – the known unknowns. (And only my first book, Mass Customization, closely hued to my original outline.)

But more interestingly I discover things in the writing that I had no idea about when I began – the unknown unknowns. These so often turn out to be the most interesting things, and in fact provide real joy in figuring them out. It is true discovery! (One or twice I might even have shouted “Eureka!”, although my usual reaction is a slightly more restrained “Aha!”. . . .)

Unknown Unknowns

So what were my primary discoveries without which this would be a very different book? Here they are, chapter by chapter, which also gives you a good outline of the book with links to where I first wrote about them here on Substack, plus a number of external resources.

Chapter 1

Of all the chapters, the first, “Getting into the Transformation Business”, was the only one in which I already knew everything. Yes, really, everything. It focused on the Progression of Economic Value, which was already the core of The Experience Economy and which I discovered in early 1994 (maybe late 1993; not sure). In this retelling of the tale, I wrote off the top of my head as I now speak about it in presentations, making it more colloquial and, I think, readable.

The first chapter was the only one in which I already knew everything

Chapter 1 ended with a section, You Are What You Charge For, on what truly makes for a transformation a distinct economic offering, and in between is a short section on the time progression that parallels The Progression explicating the five genres of economic output: time wasted, time well saved, time well spent, and time well invested. In my original outline the time progression was an entire chapter, the second chapter, in which I wanted to greatly extend what Jim Gilmore and I published earlier in the Dialogue journal, “Competing for Customer Time”. But alas and alack, my draft manuscript finished about 10,000 words over my word limit – a known known when I started! – and so it got cut down, and cut down again, and cut down once more time to a “mere” section in the first chapter. (If you detect the passive voice there, it’s because I really did not want to cut it so much. . . .) Ah well.

Ok, there actually was one thing in the chapter that was truly an unknown unknown when I started – but was originally slated for chapter 4: quasi-transformations. As you’ll read at that link, it came out of research that Dave Norton, founder of the insights consultancy Stone Mantel (of which I am a partner), and our colleagues did for our annual program The Collaborative. They discovered that consumers often said they were transformed without seeing or doing differently. While my first reaction is that they weren’t truly transformed – still my take on it today! – I’ve learned not to ignore what people say, and eventually figured out that consumers often desire such quasi-transformations that only changed them for a time.

Chapter 2

I originally reserved the second chapter for the Time Progression, as both of those chapters discussed the entire Progression of Economic Value from commodities through to transformations. Then the rest of the book would concern itself solely with (transformative) experiences & transformations. But what was originally chapter 4 – the four spheres of transformation and how they came together to enable human flourishing – became more and more important in the writing. Way more important.

For while I went into the writing knowing the four spheres (even if the third one changed from wisdom & understanding to knowledge & wisdom) and that they enabled human flourishing, what I did not yet know – and what I think is the most impactful unknown unknown – is that fostering human flourishing is the true purpose of business, its raison d’être. It is why capitalism – or, more properly, innovism – has been the greatest boon for flourishing in the history of humanity. I talked more about this in the recent post, The Two Premises and further in False-Promise Offerings – and it’s why the final name of the chapter is “Fostering Human Flourishing”.

Chapter 3

The first big discovery in what is now Chapter 3 on “Understanding Aspirants & Aspirations” is right there in the first sentence:

All transformation is identity change.