The human condition is one that seeks order from randomness and chaos. We like the fabric of the familiar. We look for patterns that fit our experiences, or experiences that fit our patterns as part of our ongoing efforts to make sense of the world. The same is true for business leaders: we frequently rely on analysis of past problems, prior risk-based assessments and solutions that have worked earlier in our careers to solve current challenges.

The issue with this type of framing is that it sometimes works.

A number of years ago I was talking to a venture capitalist about his prior career at a large tech company. We were discussing the “stickiness” of that company’s business model, and my friend made a comment I’ve never forgotten. He admitted that the company’s ability to lock in customers was valuable, but with an important caveat: “It’s a business model that will work very well…until it doesn’t.”

There was a lot of anticipation about what Warren Buffett would finally say when he held his virtual annual meeting of shareholders on Saturday, May 2, 2020. He had not spoken publicly since his interview with Yahoo Finance’s Andy Serwer on March 10, just at the beginning of the most severe period of covid-19 spread.

Why do some communications we read hit with real impact while others don't? We are engulfed by messages everywhere we turn: thousands of companies, publications, media outlets, pundits and influencers all feel they have something worth saying, wisdom for which you should willingly trade your time. Many of them are wrong.

Let me stop right here and say that I fully understand the potential irony involved in writing a blog about too many communications that aren't worth your time. I sincerely hope this piece won't be yet another marching band in that long parade.

The nation's response to the COVID-19 health crisis has been compared to our being on a war footing, with both public institutions and private firms mobilizing fully to defeat a common enemy. The analogy is apt in many ways, particularly so as we consider the personal sacrifices being made daily by many of our healthcare workers, people serving in vital areas such as food and medical support functions, those in transportation and delivery operations and so many others.

War of a certain kind it is, and such times draw out both the best and worst in our human nature, whatever the cause or duration of the crisis.

For the past thirty years I've heard business leaders make impassioned speeches about living and working in times of accelerating change. Ironically, talk of relentless change in management circles has been one of the most enduring constants throughout my career. But the types of change to which those leaders referred were generally linear and incremental: more supply chains were moving to areas of less-expensive labor, consumer habits were evolving, imports were challenging the market-share of local incumbents, technology was altering the way we work, more business was being done online or remotely...just to cite a few examples.

There are few certainties in business these days, but one of the trends to watch out for is the diminution of various types of service fees over time across a number of sectors. Any industry that can be disrupted by technology or market concentration efficiencies faces the challenge.

The human mind has a burning desire to turn chaos into order, or to assemble random data and events into recognizable patterns. New York Times bestselling author Michael Shermer calls the phenomenon patternicity, or as he defines it, “the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.”