Most of us know FUBAR as the old military acronym for something that has gone terribly wrong (f’d up beyond all recognition). There’s another FUB that can help companies avoid getting there.
Fear. Understand. Build.
Fear
Fear gets a bad rap in business. Leaders are supposed to be confident, decisive, and optimistic about the future. But fear can be useful. A new competitor appears. Technology changes what customers expect. An industry that seemed stable suddenly isn’t. AI makes something possible that would have sounded ridiculous three years ago. If that makes you a little afraid, good, that means you’re paying attention.
The problem isn’t fear. It’s what we do next.
Companies rarely respond to disruption by doing nothing. They form committees, hire consultants, buy software, launch pilots, and look for ways to respond. Activity feels like progress.
AI is a great example of this. Ask companies what they’re doing with it, and many will describe activities. You’ll hear that developers are writing code faster, reports are getting better, repetitive work is disappearing, and some SaaS applications are now built internally. Then someone shows the board a slide that says 47 AI use cases are underway, and everybody feels a little better.
The company is doing something.
Activity helps us learn, but it becomes dangerous when we mistake it for understanding. A company can get very good at using AI to improve its existing operating model without asking whether that model is the one it will need.
Understand
It’s reasonable to ask: What can we do with AI?
But that turns our attention inward to the easier questions. How can we automate more work? Reduce process costs? Increase efficiency?
The harder question is: How will AI change the things that determine whether our business succeeds in the future?
Understanding starts with the questions every business has always had to answer. AI adds new urgency and new possibilities, but the customer should still be at the center:
Do we know what customers value most?
Why do customers choose us today?
What would make them leave tomorrow?
What are they tolerating because they don’t have a better alternative?
Where are we making life harder for customers than it needs to be?
What will future customers expect that seems optional or trivial today?
What could a competitor offer that makes our product look expensive, slow, or obsolete?
These questions bring the customer back to the center. They force us to look beyond internal efficiency and understand what customers value, where they experience friction, how their expectations are changing, and what could cause them to choose someone else.
That’s the perspective we need before deciding what to build.
AI can improve how we operate, but its bigger impact will be on customer expectations and competitive possibilities.
While one company uses AI to polish yesterday’s machine, another is building the machine that replaces it.
Build
Building takes money, people, time, and a willingness to be wrong. That last one is the hardest.
The present always has the advantage. It has customers, revenue, problems, and deadlines. Established organizations are built around these realities. Budgets back known priorities, managers are rewarded for predictable execution, and mistakes draw more criticism than the opportunities nobody pursued.
The future arrives differently. It shows up as ideas competing for people, money, and attention against something already producing results. The same systems that run today’s business can quietly squeeze the life out of what comes next.
Steve Jobs had a blunt rule about this: “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.” Cannibalizing yourself requires taking resources from something that works today and putting them behind something that might replace it tomorrow.
That takes deliberate leadership. Good leaders create room to build. They give people permission to work on problems whose answers aren’t already known. They fund small bets before a traditional business case can prove they’ll work and accept that some ideas will fail along the way. When something starts working, they move people, money, and attention behind it.
None of this requires betting the company. Build something small, put it in front of someone, learn, adjust, and build again. Small bets create information, information improves understanding, and better understanding supports larger bets.
It’s the leader’s job to protect some capacity for tomorrow from the demands of today.
Organizations follow the questions their leaders ask. Celebrate the number of AI use cases and you’ll get more of them. Reward cost savings and you’ll get more efficiency. Both have value, but adaptation requires a lot more.
Leaders should reward learning, customer insight, and the willingness to pursue an idea before everyone agrees it’s obvious.
The real advantage comes from creating an organization that can move into uncertainty, learn quickly, and change direction as the evidence develops.
Then someone has to build.
Because while we’re debating what the future might bring, someone else is creating it.
Fear. Understand. Build.
Embrace a little FUB. It might keep you from becoming totally FUBAR.
Hat tip to Atlas Berry, whose FUB framing started me thinking about how businesses respond to disruption.
Photo by Urban Gyllström on Unsplash – the customer gets the final vote on whether it’s good.
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