Tardigrade, not T. rex — Kelford Labs Weekly

“The better adapted you are, the less adaptable you tend to be.”

— Gerald M. Weinberg, The Secrets of Consulting

We have a saying in our business I’d like to share with you today.

When things are uncertain or unpredictable, we remind ourselves:

“Be a tardigrade not a T. rex.”

Tardigrades, also called “water bears” or, incredibly, “moss piglets,” are ridiculously resilient little micro-animals.

They have so many lines of defense against the vagaries and dangers of nature that they can survive anywhere from the deep ocean to the vacuum of space.

For them, the highest likelihood of success means flexibility and optionality.

And, well, for us, too.

For marketing, when things are chaotic, I recommend sacrificing perfect efficiency for flexible efficacy.

You won’t be perfectly adapted for any particular situation, but you’ll be prepared for any of them.

That means not going all-in on any apparent opportunity, but reserving resources, time, and energy for other options that may turn out more effective.

Yes, there will be some player in our space that bets everything on one particular tactic or trend and wins a large part of the market.

The proverbial T. rex, if you will.

But there will be more (so, so many more) that bet everything and lose it all.

What happens is we see the T. rex (the highest earner, the biggest player) and we see their strategic purity and singularity and we think: they are the best adapted to the situation, therefore I should invest everything into a single option, too.

But what you’re actually witnessing is not genius market identification, but evolutionary market selection.

The vast, uncountable majority of players who tried to become perfectly adapted died off so the market could select the best fitted.

So, yes, we could bet the farm on being the one the market selects by putting everything into a single tactic, trend, or campaign.

Or we could give ourselves the freedom and flexibility to be ready to adapt to the market as it changes and alters.

The T. rex was undeniably cool, and it has had, I concede, far more movies made about it than the humble tardigrade.

And yes, the downside to the tardigrade is that, while it can survive almost any situation, it can’t really exploit them. You can’t really argue that it’s the dominant or most significant organism in its space.

But a large part of the mystique and the fame of the T. rex is due to its death. It was so well adapted to one situation it couldn’t survive into the next.

And if that doesn’t convince you, maybe this will:

This isn’t a permanent, fixed decision. It’s more like a dial you can tune to fit your risk tolerance, preferences, and opportunities.

And in times of confusion or unpredictability I recommend dialing efficiency down and effectiveness up. Focusing more on preserving options than on perfect capitalization of any single one.

Because we don’t control the market, we only control our response to it. And when those responses need to be fast, we need to be flexible.

We need to be adaptable.

So we can survive into the next situation, whatever that is, whenever that is. Instead of becoming an icon of another era, now past.

But this is all well and good, yet the big question remains:

If we want to be more tardigrade than T. rex, what do we actually do?

Next week…

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