Our Non-Linear World

Ed Fowkes
May 15
6 min read

People spend their lives trying to make sense of systems they cannot fully see.

For founders, those of us trying to run a business, markets move, technologies emerge, competitors rise, margins tighten and audiences shift.

Looking in, some businesses seem to catch momentum effortlessly while others push endlessly uphill for very little reward. The natural instinct is to explain these outcomes through talent, intelligence, discipline or luck. While there are always elements of those, they do not make up the complete, definitive picture.

Beneath much of business, economics and technology sit recurring, structural patterns. Curves, distributions and constraints that appear again and again across nature, physics, networks and human behaviour. Once seen, they become difficult to ignore. And like much of science and its laws, the maths behind these patterns is hard to break or to work against.

This series “Misreading the Shape of Reality” examines the laws we must all adhere to whether we like it or not. The hidden structures shaping business, growth and human systems.

The challenge is that most human beings are not naturally wired to perceive these systems clearly.

We tend to think linearly.

We are taught that effort equals reward and expect effort and reward to move proportionally. We assume growth should feel steady, progress will be visible and that inputs will be reliably connected to outputs.

But the world rarely behaves this way. Most systems that matter are actually non-linear. They compound slowly, then suddenly. They cluster unevenly. They accelerate before saturating. They reward timing as much as effort. They often feel wholly unfair, but as Ricky Gervais might put it “That doesn’t mean they’re wrong.”

Much of the frustration founders experience is not failure in the conventional sense.

It is the experience of misreading the shape of things that are and were and what will be.

Our Non-Linear World

Let’s start at the very beginning. Back in my childhood I was told “The first million is always the hardest.” It is an old phrase that I suspect used to carry more weight than it does today. For a start, it comes from a time when being a millionaire meant something very substantial. The statement represented a stark reality to me as a youngling, even if it spoke of something rather far away.

But if I look at it now and scale it down, it becomes quite interesting.

How about “The first sale is the hardest.”?

Going from zero to one is not incremental. It’s absolute. It requires a shift from nothing to something, from idea to transaction, from possibility to absolute proof. Everything that follows, in relative terms, gets easier.

One customer to two is growth. Two to three is growth again. But each step becomes smaller as a percentage, even if the absolute numbers increase by the same measure. By the time you move from one thousand to one thousand and one, the increase is almost imperceptible while the number of actual customers increases linearly. The same action produces a different experience. And this is simply, a linear line playing against a non-linear one.

This is where many founders might begin to misread what is happening. They expect growth to feel consistent, to respond proportionally to effort. They assume that more input should yield more output in a steady, predictable way.

Well…

It does not. Rarely ever.

We are trained, almost unconsciously, to think in straight lines.

Work harder, earn more. Do more, get more. Increase input, increase output. It feels neat. It becomes intuitive. But sadly, it is all deeply misleading.

The systems we operate within, whether you look at science, nature, business or technology are rarely linear. They are curved. Sometimes exponential, sometimes logistic, often layered with multiple forces acting at once to create waves.

From the inside of course, those curves are difficult to perceive. You cannot feel the shape of a curve while standing on it or in it. You have to step back quite a way to see the wood for the trees. And founders are typically too busy fighting their own fires to keep themselves on track or afloat to see anything like the shape of their wave.

3 Laws

In 1965, Gordon Moore observed that computing power would double roughly every two years. For decades, this held with remarkable consistency, becoming a kind of metronome for technological progress and the communications revolution.

Recently the narrative began to shift. Physical limits appeared. Transistors approached atomic scale. The pace, it seemed, was slowing. The second half of the chessboard, where exponential growth becomes visibly extreme, had arrived.

And then, almost as if on cue, AI arrived and the conversation changed again.

Artificial intelligence entered not simply as an extension of computing power, but as a multiplier of capability. Suddenly, progress felt as though it were accelerating once more but not only in speed. Now the scope of what was possible and what was happening was expanding.

We look to Ray Kurzweil to add a layer of perspective. His Law of Accelerating Returns suggests that technological progress does not move along a single exponential curve. Entire paradigms stack upon one another. When one wave matures, another forms beneath it.

Moore describes how capability improves within a technological era. Kurzweil suggests that eras themselves accelerate as each generation of technology becomes a tool for creating the next.

The important point for founders is that these curves do not remain confined to technology. They spill outward into markets, competition, consumer expectations and business itself. As the surrounding system accelerates, businesses experience the same compression. Product cycles shorten. Information spreads faster. Competitive advantages decay more quickly. Entire industries move from novelty to saturation in a fraction of the time they once did.

Instagram took years to reach mass adoption. ChatGPT reached a hundred million users in a matter of months. The curve has steepened. And this creates a subtle but important problem.

Founders continue to think linearly while operating inside systems that are increasingly exponential. The result is fairly predictable. Early progress feels painfully slow, leading many to abandon good ideas too soon. Later, momentum can arrive suddenly and violently, overwhelming structures that were never designed for scale. No one told you when to run. Founders simply discover, often too late, that the curve has already moved beneath them. Eventually, of course, growth slows again as markets saturate and complexity increases. The same founder with the same capability but on a different position on the curve.

One of the most important strategic questions in business is rarely operational at all. It is structural. We need to ask “Where am I on the curve?”

The logistic growth curve is one most founders will recognise, as it offers a useful way of thinking about this. Let’s look at customer adoption to explain it.

Most systems begin slowly. The first adopters arrive often in small numbers, the 5%, willing to engage with something new despite its imperfections. This phase tends to feel uncertain, even discouraging, but early adopters tend to feel excited here. The next phase sees broader adoption, the next 15%, where momentum begins to build. Eventually, the system enters a period of real acceleration, the 60%, where growth becomes more visible and validation more obvious. People begin to feel very comfortable, and FOMO even occurs.

Then, inevitably, it slows, as Verhulst noted while looking at more exponential models. Saturation approaches as we reach 80% adoption. Resistance increases as the remainder are stuck in their ways. The remaining audience becomes harder to reach, less willing to change, more expensive to acquire and yet they represent, proportionally, slower growth. What once felt like momentum begins to resemble effort again.

We see this in technology adoption, in markets, in behaviour, and within businesses themselves.

Importantly, and confusingly, we rarely experience this as a single curve. Founders move through a series of them, ideally stabilising at one level before pushing towards the next. This is one of the founding principles that both my Tables and GamePlan products were based around. The understanding that growth is less a straight ascent and more a sequence of waves that can, with care, be surfed from plateau to plateau.

Ride one too long and you mistake stability for success. Jump too early and you abandon momentum. We need instead to calculate a point of economic balance ahead and make that our goal.

If Moore, Kurzweil and Verhulst explain the complex wave effects created by outside pressures, what happens internally as we grow?

External curves are only half the story. As businesses grow, internal systemsbegin to deform under the weight of complexity itself. Next week I’ll look inward at the push and pull between efficiency and organisational strain.