Curves that Matter

I recall a conversation I had a few years ago with a colleague. We were attending a meeting of the Association for Managers of Innovation in Celebration, Florida and the group was leaving our meeting space to take a group photo. I can’t recall the spark that set us off, but we were talking about the S-curve (sigmoid curve or logistic function) at length. The curve essentially suggests that things grow rapidly at first until the environment is saturated until things grow more slowly and then eventually growth stops. We started to give examples to each other where the curve helped us understand something complicated, or how we used the curve to help us do something, and moved on to surprising places the curve explained something mysterious. Over the course of the 12 minutes or so that it took us to walk from the meeting room to the photo location and get organized for the picture, we uncovered a fair number of uses for the S-curve and joked about how it might be fascinating to do the same thing with the handful of ubiquitous curves that gave insight to so many processes. This conversation has stuck with me, somehow not fully resolved. Well, now four years later, never having done just that, here I am writing about these curves and how they all matter to Innovations in Strategy Crafting. I will explore different curves and give insight to a few applications of each for those crafting strategies and working with organizational change. More to come.