Comfort is commercially dangerous. In dynamic, competitive environments, comfort breeds entropy, erodes strategic distinctiveness, and dulls a business’s ability to respond to change. Conversely, discomfort is not just a catalyst for creativity, it’s a precondition for sustained profitability.
Mother Nature knows how to make life difficult for herself. Take, for example, the ponderosa pine tree, dependent on wildfires for its heat-activated cones to open up and release its seeds. Or the desert wildflower whose seed-coats must be scarred by flash floods and abraded by stones to germinate. Or our native blackberries, which must be entirely consumed, only able to continue their lineage after being digested and then dumped elsewhere by passing fauna.
Fire. Flood. Feces. The welcome mat for new life.
In his book, Ghost Rider, drummer and writer Neil Peart called this the “ordeal of growth”. He sees it not as a metaphor, but a mechanism—a system built on suffering, where discomfort isn’t an obstacle, but the entry fee of our continued existence.
And yet, most businesses seem hooked on the narcotic of incremental improvement, with the language of comfort (alignment, harmony, consensus) now replacing the language of commercial aggression.
All soft lighting and scented candles. No burn. No friction. No spark.
The comfort trap
It’s understandable. Comfort feels safe and familiar and predictable. But it’s also commercially dangerous. It breeds entropy, erodes distinctiveness, and dulls the ability to respond to change. It turns strategy into a game of middle-of-the-road chicken and creates organizations optimized for peace in a world increasingly built on volatility.
Which is why every senior leadership team should start asking themselves a simple question: When was the last time something made us wince?
The absence of discomfort isn’t a sign of maturity, it’s a sign you’re no longer alive in your market. That you’ve settled for building strategy and systems around minimizing pain, not maximizing potential. That you’ve found the sweet spot on the spreadsheet and pitched camp there.
But the market doesn’t give a toss how comfortable your off-grid, wood-burning-stove-heated yurt is, because every time you coast, somebody else is sprinting.
Amazon (an easy case study, yes, but a successful one) runs on discomfort. Their Day 1 culture is designed to reject the false logic of safety. Jeff Bezos describes Day 2 as: “Stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death.” Cheery bloke. Must be a real asset to any dinner party.
Of course, most businesses aren’t built for Day 1. They’re built for quarter-by-quarter box-ticking, drowning out any discordant notes under the white noise of best practice.
Strategic discomfort doesn’t mean reckless—it means restless. Disruption, for what it’s worth, is just what happens when someone else chooses discomfort faster than you do. When someone else burns the old thing to make room for the new.
Creative destruction
Economist Joseph Schumpeter famously described capitalism as a system of creative destruction. And what can be more uncomfortable than destruction? It means killing darlings and sacrificing sacred cows. Kodak knew digital was coming; they just couldn’t stomach the wholesale abandonment of their old revenue model—so someone else did it for them.
That’s the thing about discomfort. It’s not optional. The only choice is whether you initiate it or react to it. There is no neutral ground. There is no safe zone. There’s only forward or decline.
In theory, businesses know this. They read the same case studies, quote the same innovation speakers. and run the same hackathons, complete with beanbags, beers, and burritos.
But real discomfort doesn’t look like that.
It looks like a pricing strategy that gives your sales team palpitations. It sounds like a creative idea that half the boardroom hates. It feels like launching something before it’s fully baked, then watching the first feedback roll in like a gut punch.
It looks like risk. And risk, in an age of risk management, has been labelled irresponsible. Better to look like everyone else and survive a little longer, avoiding discomfort, and with it, distinction.
In a world of generative slop and AI-cough-balled-lowest-common-denominator content, standing out requires pain. You cannot optimize your way to originality. You must leap, flail, flounder—and learn.
Capability vs. optionality
Which brings us to The Capability Trap—a well-documented economic cycle that demonstrates that, when faced with increasing pressure, organizations reduce investment in capability-building activities (like research and development, experimentation, or training).
You’ll hear it in the boardroom: “Let’s not distract the team right now. We can look at that next quarter. Now isn’t the time to rock the boat.”
It might sound rational in the moment, but it’s devastating in the long run. Each utterance is a step deeper into the quicksand—a vote for urgency over strategy—until the only thing you’re capable of delivering is yesterday’s results, just with less money and less relevance.
Instead, perhaps we need to lean more into optionality.
Popularized by essayist and statistician, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, optionality is less a tactic and more a strategic stance—a structural way of thinking about how to operate when the future is unpredictable. It’s about building systems, teams, and brands that are antifragile (i.e., not just resilient under pressure, but also able to improve because of it).
For corporations, this means resisting the instinct to double down on what’s already known and optimized, and making deliberate space for what’s uncertain but potentially transformative, instead.
Small-scale product pilots, brand-side bets, experiments in new positioning or channels—all of them carry a high chance of irrelevance, and that’s precisely the point. The outcomes are uneven. Most will deliver nothing, while a few may unlock disproportionate, asymmetric upside. But that upside only becomes available if the system is set up to stomach the downside.
That means failure. That means noise. That means walking into ambiguity on purpose. Optionality doesn’t offer the comfort of certainty; it demands a tolerance for discomfort. To echo Peart: You have to be willing to pass through shit. Literally.
Discomfort as a digestive system for innovation
Discomfort breaks things down. It forces you to process what’s real and what’s wishful. It expels the inessential and fertilizes what comes next. It’s unpleasant, but it’s also how anything new gets made.
Marketing people often talk about “bravery”, usually on the conference trail after launching an A/B tested campaign that audiences unilaterally loved. But we’re not storming barricades or going over the top here—we’re bit players in an elaborate theatre of optimization. Bravery (such that it can exist in marketing) is a budget allocated to something that might not work. It’s a brand position that excludes. A product proposition that doesn’t appeal to everyone, but means everything to someone.
Discomfort is where value lives. It’s past the point of consensus, in the whisper of “I’m not sure about this”, and the tension between what works now and what might work next.
Discomfort isn’t disorder; it’s structure, just of a different kind. It’s the pressure that produces better thinking, the friction that sharpens the edge, the relentless push for truth.
So, here’s the clarion call: Choose the fire. Choose the flood. Choose the stomach acid. Choose the shit. Choose the ideas that risk backlash, the product that splits the room, the strategy that makes your leadership team’s sphincters’ contract. Choose the thing that doesn’t feel safe, because safe is a commodity now.
And if you’re not sure whether you’re in a place of discomfort, here’s a clue: If everyone in the room agrees, you’re already late to the party.
Cover image: Yuliia Lakeienko