Red Queen Effect: When You Stop Improving You Lose

You have to improve to survive. The red queen hypothesis postulates that species must adapt, evolve, and proliferate in order to survive against other ever-evolving species. The author of the theory, Leigh Van Valen, named it the red queen effect because species have to evolve in order to stay in the same place or else go extinct. The same exact way as the red queen said to Alice in Lewis Carrol’s knowledge: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

The same effect has been equated to the interspecies races. That is, the predator-prey evolution. If one were to stop evolving, they would go extinct. The rabbit evolves increasing speed to escape the fox. The fox volves increasing speed to reach the rabbit. The rabbit is faster because he is running for his life. The fox is running for his dinner. This is where we can extend the red queen effect as a mental model. Businesses engage in price wars. If one were to stop, they would lose their entire customer base to a cheaper alternative. They also take turns in innovative combat. If a competitor doesn’t put forth anything new, their rivals quickly speed past them with more appealing products and services.

Species must continuously evolve because their competitors, predators, and prey are also evolving. So do businesses. Tech giants like Apple, Google, and Amazon never stop releasing new features precisely for this reason. As do individuals. Stagnation means obsolescence. Professionals have to continuously update their skills and knowledge to keep up with industry standards. A software developer from twenty years ago is useless today. The concept even applies to countries and organizations. They must continuously invest in advancements to keep pace. Take the Cold War arms race between the U.S. and Soviet Union.

Real-world instances of the red queen effect:

• Corporate Competition: Netflix and Disney Plus constantly develop new, original content because stopping would result in a loss of subscribers to competitors. Businesses that fail to innovate eventually die (e.g. Blockbuster burned, Netflix overtook it).

• Fitness and Health: if you maintain the same workout routine for long, your body adapts, and progress plateaus. To improve, you need to progressively overload via additional weight, intensity, or variation.

• Job Market: graphic designers once only needed basic photoshop skills. Today, they have to learn user interaction and user experience design, motion graphics, and artificial intelligence principles just to be employable. Lifelong learning is not longer an option; it is a must to maintain professional relevance.

• Economic Growth: countries have to continue investing in infrastructure, education, and innovation just to keep their economies afloat relative to others. Standing still in a global economy as active as ours means falling behind.

• Cybersecurity and Hacking: every time cybersecurity measures improve, hackers have developed a more advanced technique to breach them. Security is a continuous, evolving process.

How you might use the red queen effect as a mental model: (1) expect life to suck — recognize that staying in the same place requires as much as effort as improving a lot of the time, specially business and personal growth, where you should expect that you’ll always need to push forward just to stay relevant; (2) learn all the time — industries evolve faster than ever, so staying on par by reading books, taking courses, and following thought leaders is a no-brainer; (3) don’t stagnate, move — if competitors introduce a feature, start work on the next thing rather than reacting later; (4) balance sustainability — don’t take the effect too far, knowing that you should prioritize high-impact improvements instead of endless work; (5) change the game — sometimes the best way to victory is not to run faster, but to change direction (e.g. Tesla concentrated on electric cars whilst others fought for dominance in gas-powered vehicles, and they won the vehicle manufacturing market).