Opportunity in uncertainty

(for the World Coffee Leaders Forum 2023)

This talk was about how intersecting trends in urbanism, new technology, and sustainability create uncertainty for the coffee industry — and how the coffee industry can take advantage of that uncertainty to innovate. The slides from the talk are here.

In a nutshell:

1. We most often associate uncertainty with potential downsides that have to be mitigated.
2. This makes us forget that uncertainty is also a wellspring of innovation that creates upside for businesses.
3. Experimentation is a powerful tool for business leaders to take advantage of uncertainty to drive product, service, and business model innovation.
4. Unfortunately, most businesses either don’t do enough experiments or don’t optimise how they do their experiments.
5. Experiments can be designed to be more strategic by reducing wasted effort (by setting guardrails), speeding up the process of finding new things to test (by actively encouraging emergence), and scaling up more effectively (by resourcing quickly and appropriately).

Related short articles which are relevant:

1. Why uncertainty is necessary for innovation.
2. How to design good experiments.
3. How to formulate good problems.
4. How to think about strategic tradeoffs.