FOMO > FOGO, Really This Time

We are all familiar with FOMO. The Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) can be a tremendous catalyst for change and reinvention. There are many cataclysmic shifts coming down the pike, and they have profound implications for incumbents (this nice deck was shared among my network recently). Visionary leaders seek to harness these changes, and ride them as waves into accelerated growth opportunities.

(Brief aside: an excellent exercise for senior leadership teams is to take a look through this deck, and ask, what are the 3-4 trends that are likely to affect our business in the next 10 years? And then ask, how can we get in front of those changes, and become a leader in them, rather than be disrupted by them? More details here.)

The problem is when the fear of missing out (FOMO) is overcome by a lesser known phenomenon, FOGO, or the Fear Of Getting it wrOng. When FOGO > FOMO, that spells trouble. In an age of turbulence, an incumbent's fear of missing out on a potential opportunity/new disruptions/new need must be much greater than its fear of getting it wrong.

This is what Steve Jobs did masterfully at Apple with the introduction of the ROKR. "The what???" you might say. The ROKR was a predecessor to the iPhone, a collaboration with Motorola that famously imploded (see Wired article from Nov 2005). And that's OK! They're doing just fine. Some might say, "despite such a blunder..." But I'd say, "Because they were willing to make such a mistake." They didn't want to miss out on the wave of disruption they saw coming.

Their Fear Of Missing Out trumped their Fear Of Getting it wrOng.

That's not to say it exploration needs to be expensive. Not at all. Experimentation is the Anti-FOG.

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