With the mind-numbing pace of change that seems to be all around us, it is also worthwhile to consider what is highly unlikely to change as you consider your strategy.

In my book The End of Competitive Advantage, I suggest several early warning signs that an advantage is likely to be on the decline. How many of these do you think your organization’s leaders would be likely to agree with?

• I don’t buy my own company’s products or services. 

• We are investing at the same levels or even more but not getting margins or growth in return. 

• Customers are finding cheaper or simpler solutions that are “good enough.”

• Competition is emerging from places we didn’t expect. 

• Customers are no longer excited about what we have to offer. 

• We are not considered a top place to work by the people we would like to hire. 

• Some of our very best people are leaving. 

• Our stock is perpetually undervalued. 

• Our technical people (scientists and engineers, for instance) are predicting that a new technology will change our business. 

• We are not being targeted by headhunters for talent. 

• The growth trajectory has slowed or reversed. 

• Very few innovations have made it successfully to market in the last two years. 

• The company is cutting back on benefits or pushing more risk to employees.

• Management is denying the importance of potential bad news.

Back to our analytical approach. The issue you need to focus on in your analysis of arenas is whether a change in the daily constraints that your business operates under might allow a competitor to address customer pain points differently or better than you do.

Deeply understanding the situations customers are in, the jobs they are trying to get done in those situations, and the outcomes they are seeking is vital to anticipating how those situations might change.

We’ve explored the idea of an arena, rather than an industry, as being a crucial level of analysis. We’ve looked at how irritants and blockers in key stakeholders’ paths to getting jobs done can open the door to an inflection sparked by an organization that removes those attributes. We’re now on the brink of considering what actions should be taken next.