The Danger of Dominant Logic: What Pioneer’s Blind Spot Reveals About Disruption in Agriculture

This week I was reading Escaping Gravity by my friend Dan Schultz, looking at marketing and strategy through the lens of category creation and a story that includes Microsoft and Google.

In it he talks about solving problems through a different frame — which is where “disruption” stems from.

It also hits on a subject I have been thinking about the last few weeks as I have been reading some history: Obsolescence, when a new company or innovation make a companies entrenched advantages irrelevant.

Some of that thinking has been in the context of “what if” shifts occur — what if there is a technological breakthrough that makes laser based weeding technology broadly viable? What happens if regulatory changes in major markets stifle new synthetic chemistry from coming to market? What if quality becomes more important than yield?

Not that any of these will happen, but it creates an interesting thought experiment to think through the second, third, and fourth order implications on farmers, companies and markets.

The risk often appears low, but sometimes complete obsolescence isn’t the only issue.

The Maginot Line

The Maginot Line was France’s defensive system built after World War I to prevent another German invasion. It represented a massive investment in concrete, artillery, and underground infrastructure to provide an impenetrable block along France’s eastern border. The logic was that by fortifying that area, France could deter any future aggression and buy time to mobilize its army if war broke out again.

The problem was that the strategy was rooted in earlier kinds of warfare. The Line was designed for the slow, positional warfare of World War I, not the fast-moving mechanized warfare that came with World War II. When Germany invaded in 1940, it bypassed the Line by attacking through Belgium and the Ardennes with “blitzkreig,” encompassing speed, tanks and air power.

France was occupied in less than 6 weeks.

The Maginot Line was an approach for a time that no longer existed, illustrating how investments can become obsolete when the nature of competition changes, or new technology arises.

HMS Dreadnaught

The HMS Dreadnought was launched by the Royal Navy in 1906 and was the turning point in naval warfare. It introduced a new class of battleship that rendered all others obsolete almost overnight.

While none of its innovations were entirely new, the Dreadnought was the first to combine them into a cohesive and effective design. Its launch forced every major navy to restart their battleship programs, collapsing Britain’s long-standing advantage under the “Two Power” rule (larger than the 2nd and 3rd largest navies combined) and catalyzing an arms race centered on “Dreadnought type” ships.

The Dreadnought era was brief, though. In the decades that followed, battleships grew larger and more powerful, through a period of rapid iteration and regulation-driven design quirks. Yet, just as the Dreadnought embodied the peak of traditional naval gunnery, its reign was already being undermined by new technologies— specifically, aircraft and carriers.

Within 40 years, the aircraft carrier had displaced the battleship as the dominant force. The transition shows a recurring dynamic in technology and progress that innovations accelerate obsolescence and impose higher costs that reshape entire systems, both in militarily and in business.

In agriculture, there hasn’t been many noticeable shifts that render an entire company and it’s IP irrelevant — after all, the industry might have more entities that are more than a century old than any other industry!

But, there is an example where innovation had severe repercussions to one of the most significant players in the industry.

Subscribe to Upstream Ag Professional to read the rest.