The innovator's dilemma of the individual

Last week, in the comments, someone made the pivot for me before I could write it.

Raj Kumar pointed out that at senior level, the fear in last week's post is rarely about being replaced by a model. It's the fear that a decision you own will start arriving pre-made — and nobody will tell you whether your no still counts.

That's not weakness. That's a precise read of where authority is going.

Christensen's original insight about incumbents was never that they're slow or complacent. They underinvest in disruption because they're rational: serving their best customers, defending their best margins, allocating capital exactly where the returns are provable — and losing anyway.

Scott D. Anthony makes the same failure land on a person rather than a firm. Citing Chris Argyris: highly competent people rarely fail, so they never learned how to learn from failing. Competence becomes a liability the moment the game changes.

A process owner with a decade in one domain. A consultant with fifteen years of module expertise. An autonomous system doesn't just change their workflow — it devalues the specific capital they spent a career building: the deep knowledge that made them the one people asked.

Holding back isn't irrational there. It's protecting an asset, on entirely defensible grounds.

I watched this in a four-year transformation program: a team declined a future that was, for them, a downgrade. They'd built their craft around one annual release, planned twelve months out. Quarterly delivery didn't ask them to work harder — it asked them to be good at something else, and nobody gets applause for the second week of being a beginner.

Call that resistance and you're fighting the wrong thing.

One move, for yourself: write down the three things that made you valuable at work. Next to each, one word — cheaper or scarcer. Most of us find at least one that's getting cheaper fast. That's the same portfolio question every incumbent gets wrong: protecting the asset that pays today is rational, right up to the moment it isn't — and that moment is arriving faster than it used to. Gartner puts the half-life of a technical skill at two to five years by 2030, down from eight to twelve historically.

What the new capital looks like — and how you get to own it — is where this chapter still owes you an answer.

💬 Which of your own strengths is getting cheaper — and what are you doing about it?