The butterfly effect in business

The butterfly effect. Just like in chaos theory, in business, small changes can lead to dramatically different outcomes.

This is particularly true when it comes to who is in key roles within an organization. Most of us know there's a big difference between a great person in a role versus someone who's just "fine."

What we often don't see in the moment is how dramatically better things could be with the right person in a crucial position.

Consider Ballmer's tenure as Microsoft's CEO. While I’m sure he was a "fine" leader, solid enough to have a peak named after him, Satya Nadella came into the same role and delivered dramatically improved outcomes.

It wasn’t any single thing Nadella did that drove that outcome but the compounding effect of _everything_ he did.

Thousands of small decisions that in aggregate delivered a massively different future than any trend line showed when he started.

An exceptional person might make decisions that seem only marginally different on the surface or when looked at individually, but together, lead to vastly improved outcomes. These outcomes are the product of all those smaller decisions, building upon each other, magnifying and compounding their impact over time.

In essence, the butterfly effect in business is most powerfully manifested through the actions of exceptional individuals in key roles. Their ability to make consistently better decisions, even if only slightly better, creates a compounding effect that can dramatically alter a company's trajectory.

While we can't predict the future, we can anticipate how various decisions will influence subsequent ones, setting the stage for desired outcomes.

Always thinking a few steps ahead helps ensure what you’re doing drives the business towards its main objectives.

An ill-considered policy or blindly agreeing to unnecessary customer requirements can significantly influence your ability to deliver tomorrow’s needs, causing avoidable and worse, unseen productivity drag that magnifies over time.

To succeed in life and in business, you need to make sure you're aiming for the right goal.

Despite what many people in security often think, the function exists not to build the most secure platform, but to drive revenue and grow the business. Everything else is noise.

We can argue if that mindset is good for society at large (it’s not) but that’s why companies have security teams - we’re here to bring business value, not because the company was just really excited to hire someone who can successfully expand all the acronyms in a Gartner security report.

Viewing every decision in the context of delivering on those business goals is crucial to success.

Losing sight of that goal is what led generations of IT workers to be locked up in dimly lit, awkwardly cluttered corporate basements, out of sight so nobody would have to listen to them moan about how all the dumb people “Just don’t get it”.

Ha ha.

Joke’s on us.

Let’s not do that again.

If your company needs to be SOC 2 certified, that’s a goal, likely in support of a larger goal - to unlock enterprise sales.

There’s millions of ways to reach that same goal, all with subtly different impacts on the business.

Some paths tie up your engineering team with busy work that looks great in a spreadsheet and brings a lilted smile to your auditor's handsomely stoic face. Unfortunately, no one will be able to reasonably explain why it improves security.

Other paths keep things lean, measurably moving your program forward and deliver a report faster that enables enterprise sales, sooner.

Plan, meet goal.

The cumulative effect of all these small decisions when multiplied across all the different departments is the difference between a stagnant business and a fast moving, adaptable one. It’s the difference between a business where everyone is pulling for the same goal and one where everyone is pulling for their own goals.

Don’t forget the goal.