We now live in a world where instability and uncertainty have become the norm. Every day, companies are expected to do more, move faster, deliver, adapt, and absorb new disruptions simply to maintain their position.
This constant pressure has a name: the Red Queen effect. The expression comes from Through the Looking-Glass, the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where the Red Queen tells Alice that she has to run as fast as she can just to stay in the same place. The image was later adopted in biology to describe the continuous pressure on species to adapt in an environment that is constantly changing.
The same logic applies in business. Many leaders are investing, innovating, hiring, digitizing, and improving their processes while still feeling as though they are standing still. More energy is being spent, yet room to manoeuvre keeps shrinking. Companies are running faster without necessarily becoming stronger.
For us, that is a sign that a change in posture is needed. Slowing down does not mean giving up on progress. It means taking the time to redefine ambitions, rethink the business model, and determine what should truly be maintained, adapted, developed, or abandoned. The goal is no longer simply to improve performance, but to combine performance with robustness so the company can endure over time.
Performance rests on two complementary dimensions: effectiveness, which means doing the right things, and efficiency, which means doing them the right way with the fewest resources possible. Both remain essential, but they are no longer enough in an environment shaped by disruption, dependencies, and hard-to-predict events.
Robustness does not replace performance. It complements it by giving a company the ability to keep achieving its objectives when conditions change. It protects teams, knowledge, and operational capabilities, reduces critical dependencies, and creates the room needed to absorb disruptions without constantly having to rethink the entire system.
Combining performance and robustness therefore helps address both the end of the month and the end of the world. Performance addresses the demands of the present by delivering what is expected and generating enough net profit to reward the effort and risk involved. Robustness prepares for the future by using part of that margin to strengthen the company’s ability to withstand future shocks.
Those shocks may come in the form of black swans, rare and difficult-to-predict events with major consequences, or white rhinos, highly visible and well-known risks that are too often ignored until they become impossible to avoid.
In a world shaped by the Red Queen effect, simply running faster may only leave us exhausted. The real challenge is now to build companies that are strong enough to perform and robust enough to last.
