It’s so sad that we all know that one person who is too academic and rigid to succeed, maybe someone else who loves too much to make a good parent/spouse or that one person who is too tall to be a good basketball player. Perhaps we know that one person who listens to motivational CDs a bit too much, follows excessively his pastor’s advice and goes to church just too much to proper. It’s a sad but a likely place anyone can be in without balance.
Some things in their short term can be predictable and straight lined. However the concept of success and sustainable growth is not a linear curve, but a quadratic one. Like every inverted U curve, it has points of Exploitation and Exploration– Crest and Troughs; Maximum Points and Minimum Points of what worked.
Exploitation on one hand is the non changing-not to change; knowing what to continue in your life/your organisation. And on the other hand is Exploration; knowing what to either start or stop (even if it has once worked but about to stop working). And the secret to staying afloat, is seeing your business or life journey as a dynamic parabola with troughs to explore and crests to exploit.
Like the concepts of Limits and Continuity in Calculus, it’s great to always tend your variables towards your life crest using your troughs as points to learn, and points to explore. This is all in search for a predictable gradient. Knowing what to explore and what to exploit, knowing when to explore mainly and when to exploit mainly. It’s about finding that delicate balance like YingYangs do.
Exploitation is that leveraging phase of what you already know or have. Exploration on the other hand are those times, you need to just stop already because you need to apply something else, you need to learn something new.
The challenge is that a lot of people don’t know when to explore a new idea, concept, trend or opportunity, when to keep exploring then suddenly stop; to stop digging for gold to start exploiting it because you already have acres of it. And as you exploit, you keep at it till the point to not get too comfortable with exploitation. At that point you move on to exploring. If we were to draw it in a quadratic graph, that point of sudden turn just before redundancy sets in, and marginal growth becomes zero, innovation will be born through exploitation.
Life is all about Exploration and Exploitation, same as business. Stay on a delicate balance between both.
Watch a clip on Life, Business and It’s Growth Curves- Exploitation and Exploration Points
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irm8EaWYcb4
Eizu, ©Hexavia!
Strategy. Business StartUps and Corporate Restructuring Consulting
T: 08035202891
Uwaoma Eizu is the lead strategist at Hexavia! He is a graduate of Mathematics with two MBAs and over a decade of experience working with startups and big businesses. His core is in building startups and in corporate restructuring. He is also a certified member of the Nigerian Institute of Management, Institute of Strategic Management of Nigeria and the Project Management Institute, USA. By the side, he writes weekly for the BusinessDay newspaper.
1 comment
This is a masterpiece on life and business realities, as usual. In addition to the above, may i make the following contributions: that LIFE AND INDEED EVERYTHING IS SINUSOIDAL IN NATURE AND PRACTICE. UP TODAY AND TOMORROW IS DOWN.
WE WILL BE BETTER OFF WHEN WE REALIZE THAT BEING DOWN TODAY IS NOT THE END, BUT A BEAUTIFUL OPPORTUNITY TO RISE ABOVE THE LEVEL WE FELL FROM.
LIFE AND BUSINESS ARE ALL ABOUT GIVE(‘DOWN’/EXPLORATION) AND TAKE(‘UP’/EXPLOITATION).
THANKS FOR THE PRIVILEGE AND PLATFORM PROVIDED FOR ME TO SHARE MY THOUGHTS ON THIS ALL IMPORTANT LIFE SUBJECT.
STAY BLESSED AND FRESH.