A few years back, I watched a documentary about Blockbuster Video. There's this moment where a former executive describes the decision not to acquire Netflix in 2000. You can see him still wrestling with it. He wasn't foolish. He wasn't asleep at the wheel. He was operating from a deeply reasonable set of assumptions about how the video rental business worked. And those assumptions, forged from years of success, were exactly what prevented him from seeing clearly.

I think about that executive a lot lately. Not because he failed, but because he was doing everything right by the rules of the world he'd always operated in. That's exactly what makes discontinuity so disorienting. The problem isn't poor judgment. It's judgment that's perfectly calibrated to an environment that no longer exists.

What We Mean When We Say "Discontinuity"

Last week, we introduced a word for what's happening to leaders right now: discontinuity. Not disruption. Not transformation. Something harder to name, and harder to navigate. It makes everything you've learned feel slightly, stubbornly off.

Here's the simplest way I can put it: discontinuity is when the rules of the game permanently change. Not temporarily. Not until things "settle down." The break is the new baseline.

Disruption implies turbulence you can navigate through. Transformation implies an arc you can plan around. Discontinuity is neither. It's a permanent shift in causality, where what worked before doesn't just stop working. It actively gets in the way, and the experience you've built stops being a compass and starts being a blindfold. The deeper the expertise, the more invisible the assumptions underneath it. And the more those assumptions distort what you're seeing now.

So, What Does This Mean for You and Your Teams?

Where on your team do you notice smart, capable people reaching for the same playbook and coming up just slightly short? That gap, that subtle misfire between experience and outcome, is worth paying attention to. It might not be a performance problem. It might be a discontinuity problem.

The core question for leaders changes in a discontinuous environment. It stops being just "what capabilities does this individual need?" and becomes something more collective: “what shared understanding do we have that's now obsolete, and what do we need to build together to replace it?” That's a fundamentally different kind of work.

Over the coming weeks, we'll get into what discontinuity actually looks like inside organizations, and what it looks like when teams build the capacity to lead through it, rather than get outpaced by it.

In the meantime, we'd love to hear what you're noticing. Find us on LinkedIn or just hit reply. Or set up a time to chat. This is a conversation worth having out loud.