Fractal Thinking
At its core, business scaling is a market discovery process that turns niches into mass markets.
I’ve explained how complex systems are often fractals in business scaling and how the real world follows many principles of fractals.
Benoit Mandelbrot, who coined the term "fractal," made fractal geometry an incredible tool for describing the real world. A fractal is a pattern that repeats itself at various scales.
A great example is cauliflower, a cruciferous vegetable with a fascinating shape. If you zoom in, you find the same pattern and shape repeated repeatedly.
This, in particular, is a Roman cauliflower; if you zoom in and out repeatedly, you will see a self-repeating pattern.
The exact shape is repeated over and over at various scales.
As a sort of Russian Matryoshka doll.
In short, complex systems in the real world are very irregular.
They look similar at various scales (a neighborhood is made of blocks, a city is made of neighborhoods, and a country is made of cities). Yet, when things scale up and down, the dynamics change.
This is what a complex system means. The system's dynamics are determined not by the shape itself but by its size and scale.
Why is this important to us here? A few implications:
Smaller scale is easier to handle, as complex dynamics kick in exponentially at a broader scale (you don't control large, complex systems)
Complex systems are mostly perturbated. Therefore, the more you take on a larger market, the more you expose yourself to unknown risks, volatility, and chances to fail.
A bigger opportunity might not be a reversible one. There is indeed a much bigger opportunity in a larger market, but there is a point at which you cannot reverse your position. As you get exposed to the largest chunk of the market, you can't go back. Why? You have structured your whole company to survive in that market, and if that market suddenly changes, shrinks, or is taken over by another market, the company might collapse with it.
You need to be aware of these things when creating options to scale.
That is where you get fractal thinking.
Fractal Thinking as a Hybrid Between Analytical and Systems Thinking
