In my opinion, a lot of what's worth knowing doesn't have to be invented. It can be observed. Watch natural systems closely enough and the same structures reappear — in completely different forms, at different scales, but with the same underlying logic. Things that share no common ancestor and no common purpose end up solving the same problems the same way.

So let me borrow one case in particular. Let's use something that happened a very long time ago to try to predict the future — because a company behaves a lot like a living cell, and cells have faced radical change before.

I recently moved an old article of mine onto my wiki, on the history of Earth's great oceans through geological time (Histoire chronologique des grands océans du Phanérozoïque). It's a reminder of how deep the planet's past runs — and during one of those distant eras, long before the period that article covers, an event took place that changed the rules of life itself. Around 2.4 billion years ago, the environment of every living thing on Earth changed drastically: the Great Oxygenation. Cyanobacteria had begun producing oxygen, and its level in the atmosphere rose fast. I'll spare you the detail, but the key fact is this — for the organisms of the time, almost all anaerobic, oxygen was not an opportunity. It was a poison. It corroded their chemistry. For life built around the old equilibrium, the new environment was lethal, and most of it died.

But the very same change that was a mass extinction for those who couldn't adapt was the greatest catalyst in the history of life for those who could. A few cells did something radical: instead of merely resisting oxygen, they integrated it — taking aerobic bacteria inside themselves as a permanent internal core, the ancestors of mitochondria. Oxygen-based respiration extracts far more usable energy from the same food than anaerobic metabolism does — roughly fifteen times more. Suddenly a cell had access to a vastly bigger energy budget, and could afford a scale of complexity that was previously unpayable. From that leap came cells roughly a thousand times larger, and eventually the entire explosion of complex, multicellular life we see today. The poison became the engine.

Hold that shape in mind, because it might be about to repeat.

For a lot of companies today, AI may well be that oxygen. It is spreading fast, and it doesn't much care whether you were ready. For an organisation built entirely around its old equilibrium, it reads as a threat — something that corrodes established processes, roles, and certainties. And for those using all their energy to maintain homeostasis, that's exactly what it will be. But the same force is a catalyst for the ones who do what those first cells did: not merely resist it, but integrate it as a new internal core — and unlock a scale of capability that was previously unpayable. Same event. Poison for one, engine for the other. The variable isn't the environment. It's the capacity to adapt.

Staying alive is not the same as staying still. Maintaining equilibrium is neither free nor passive. A resting cell burns much of its energy just holding the line — constantly pushing back against everything that leaks the wrong way.

Your status quo is already burning most of your energy. Most of your organisational energy goes into simply maintaining the current state — the coordination overhead, the meetings about meetings, the effort of keeping the process intact. Standing still already costs you most of your energy; you're just not counting it. And leaders read that stability as the absence of risk. Biologically it's the opposite: a cell that pours everything into homeostasis and nothing into renewal isn't being prudent — it stopped metabolising. It looks fine for a moment. Then it's gone — especially once the oxygen is rising.

Innovation is the metabolism, not the initiative. This is where the mapping stops being decorative. The energy surplus did something subtle: it let the cell keep redundant copies of its genes. One copy kept doing the old job; the other was free to mutate — to become raw material for something new. That's how a system gets ready for change before change arrives. Innovation works the same way. It isn't a lab or a budget line bolted onto the real business; it's the metabolism itself — the surplus that funds spare options no one strictly needs yet, until the environment makes one of them essential.

And regulated industries feel this most sharply. For those of us who work in one, the tension is built in: banks are homeostasis machines par excellence — built for stability, control, zero deviation, and rewarded for it. That's a genuine survival advantage in a stable environment. It's also the exact mechanism that starves adaptation when the environment shifts — and the oxygen is rising fast.

This is the moment those forces were built for. Here's the hopeful part. In most organisations, the capacity to adapt already exists — it's just been running quietly in the background, underfunded, waiting. The people who experiment, the teams who question the process, the instincts that never quite fit the quarterly rhythm: those are the duplicate genes, the spare options carried at a cost through the stable years. A stable environment kept them dormant. This one doesn't. Now is exactly the moment for that latent innovation force to stop being tolerated at the margins and start driving the change — because the surplus you spent years quietly maintaining is precisely what the new environment is about to reward.

The forces of adaptation are already inside your walls — and if you're reading this, you may well be one of them. Your organisation has spent years investing in you, carrying you through the stable seasons the way a cell carries a spare gene it doesn't yet need. This is the moment that investment was for. It's our turn to give it back: to stop waiting at the margins, and drive the change. Who's in?