If you haven’t read it already, check out the Sucker’s Game (pt 1) here.

So how do you tell if the game you’re playing is still a winners game, or if it’s become a suckers game?

Firstly, you need to cultivate an awareness of your own assumptions. What things does your business or industry take as facts, but are in fact assumptions which are subject to change.

“All bachelors are unmarried.”
It’s a fact, a priori, not subject to change.

“Great service is a competitive advantage” is not a priori, it is a posteriori – it is empirical knowledge based on an investigation of the world.
And the world can change.

If the world changes and you have build your business upon a posteriori knowledge that you mistakenly think is a priori, you’re playing a Suckers Game.

So the first rule is to be aware of hidden assumptions.

The second is to be alert to signs of the effect of change. Most of the time it’s very difficult to notice the change itself, (unless is a catastrophe, and if it’s a catastrophe, a Black Swan, then everyone was playing a Sucker’s Game – sometimes it just happens).

But the effects of change show up like momentary glitches in the matrix.

Here’s a screenshot of a group chat with some friends of mine from 2017 about a restaurant and a urinal…

Ok, so what is supposed to be going on here, and what is actually going on?

Well, it’s about a restaurant. What are restaurants for? Food, right? That’s the product, right?

But here’s a friend of mine telling everyone about a business that sells food where the food was merely okay.

But the experience, the experience was worth talking about, worth sharing.

Hang on – so if a restaurant is worth going to, not for the average food but instead for the very cool experience, what are they selling?

Are they in the food business, or the experience business?
Why aren’t we talking about the food?
Surely we should be talking about the food if that’s the product…

And when the conventional model tells you that you should be talking about X, but you notice that people around you are actually talking about Y, that’s a sign that the game has changed.

But wait, maybe restaurants aren’t in the goods economy (food), maybe they’re in the service economy, and we shouldn’t expect that people to be talking about food. Good food is “table-steaks” for a restaurant, but they’re really competing on service…

Well, consider this screenshot from the same conversation, only 10 messages later…

Wait, what?!

How is that kind of service not the lead story? Dershnee asks, “How was dinner?”, and if we were in a service economy we’d expect the very next thing to be, “OMG, we ordered a bottle of R260 bubbles, they didn’t have, and the gave us a R600 bottle instead. Service was fantastic”

But it’s not. It’s not even the next after next thing. It’s 10 messages later. How is it possible that remarking about this kind of service is an afterthought?

We should be talking about X, but we’re actually talking about Y, and that’s a sign that the game has changed.

Look around in your own life – are you going to buy the 3 star product on Amazon or the sort by rating and select from the plethora of 5 star rated ones.

3 star AirBnB for your trip?

3 star restaurant on Uber eats?

Once you start looking you’ll quickly find that great products and great service are table stakes, and that the businesses people are talking about are the ones with great experiences.

And in the age of social media, the stories that spread are the stories that win.

And this isn’t a new thing, or something that’s going to happen in the future. That screen up there is from 2017, and it was already all around us then.

The change has already happened on the consumer end, and in business, the winning game is played by the ones leveraging the consumer shift toward experiences, not those playing the old game of products and service.

Products are services are merely the means to deliver an experience.

Your restaurant is a stage, your food is a prop, your waiters are actors, and you’re selling an experience.

Your bank branch is a stage, your app and your algorithm are props, your tellers and financial advisors are actors, and it all comes together to compete as an experience.