Responsiveness and disruptive influence are the cornerstone of agility, because change through continuous experimentation is fundamental to life. Healthy and viable systems maintain their complexity far from equilibrium, relentlessly fighting collapse and death. After all, “poised” on the brink of chaos, there is an obvious business definition for agility:

Responsiveness to signals in a market with imperfect information and imperfect competition.

This context necessitates process control that keeps identity and novelty in constant tension – even against our most brilliant ideas. Thus, our tactical principles for general preparedness, quick orientation, and powerful responsiveness will be rooted in the need to orient faster than the enemy system, our ideological competition. Only the working product of our efforts can provide a pragmatic judgment of the value we have created, so the ultimate measure of our success as a Disruptive Influence is the actual change in behavior we have caused.

Because individuals and interactions are inherently complex, adaptive, and difficult to predict in the reality of socioeconomic competition, we value knowing them directly, studying them and interpreting their position ourselves. We value this over relying on their predictability, likelihood of adherence to an agreed-upon process, or correct use of the best possible tool for any given job. Although we assume processes and tools taken at face value will deceive us into a false sense of stability, we also recognize that individuals and interactions cannot always be taken at face value either.

Because responsiveness, both in decisiveness of action in an unexpected situation and as adaptation over a long-term investment horizon, will consistently be awarded with asymmetric payoffs, we can only trust a plan to the extent it includes contingencies, delays commitment, and distributes control to the individual with the best understanding of the situation at the time a decision must be made.

Because compromise is the inevitable and unsavory outcome of “contract” negotiation, while creative endeavors in contradistinction rely on the energy of tension, cognitive dissonance, intra-organizational paradoxes, and conflicting interpretations, we invest our time and effort in social exchanges while delaying formalization. A contract relies on an external locus of control for its power and validity, whereas we must prioritize a social and socioeconomic view of the complex system we hope to lead into adaptation.

Because a socioeconomic “factor of production” is defined by its output, evaluated on how much more value “the whole” can add in excess of its “parts”, and because digital products are continuously created and maintained but never mass-produced, we take the tangible product of our endeavors as the only valid measure of its worth.  However good the product design looks on paper, however well-defined the future state is documented, only exchange in the marketplace can determine the economic value of the product we have actually created