From Forces to Factors: The Strategy Model Built for a Moving World
For decades, frameworks like Porter’s Five Forces helped leaders make sense of competition, profitability, and positioning. They’ve served us well.
But the market they were built for no longer exists.
The old models assumed stable categories, long competitive cycles, and predictable market boundaries. Today, category lines blur overnight, competitors arrive from unexpected sectors, and customer needs shift before the quarterly strategy meeting even happens.
We needed a different lens — one that could decode these shifting dynamics in real time.
That’s why the 5 Factors were created.
The Real Origin Story
The 5 Factors weren’t born in a conference room as an update to Porter. They emerged from five distinct schools of thought that each addressed a piece of the modern challenge:
The Innovator’s Dilemma (Clayton Christensen) — the risk of incumbents overlooking disruptive threats because they’re optimized for the status quo.
Blue Ocean Strategy (W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne) — the power of creating uncontested market space rather than fighting over saturated waters.
Jobs to Be Done theory — the discipline of understanding what “job” the customer is really hiring your product or service to do, and how those jobs evolve.
Amazon’s “Working Backwards” approach — starting from the ideal customer experience and reverse-engineering the solution.
IDEO’s human-centered design — designing from the perspective of people’s lived needs, not just business goals.
These perspectives share a common thread: they challenge the default thinking that markets are fixed, competition is obvious, and strategy is something you revisit once a year.
The 5 Factors distilled the most actionable elements of these philosophies into a set of dynamic market pressures that leaders can track and act on.
The 5 Factors
Each factor represents a distinct way market conditions can erode advantage or open new opportunity:
Demand Drift — the slow, often invisible shift in what customers value, expect, or prioritize.
Category Containment — the limiting effect of a fixed category definition that prevents expansion or reframing.
Innovation Gravity — the pull toward familiar, incremental improvements at the expense of breakthrough innovation.
Competitive Fluidity — the reality that your next competitor may come from an entirely different sector.
Market Signal Noise — the danger of acting on hype, false positives, or surface-level data instead of true market shifts.
These are not abstract ideas — they’re live forces in every business environment today. And unlike traditional static frameworks, the 5 Factors were built for motion.
From 5 Factors to the Recalibration Impact Model (RIM)
The 5 Factors were a powerful diagnostic tool, but diagnosis alone doesn’t create momentum.
Leaders needed a system for turning those insights into decisive action. That’s how the Recalibration Impact Model (RIM) was born — embedding the 5 Factors into a three-phase process:
Reimagine — reframing the challenge and expanding strategic possibilities.
Rethink — developing and validating options with speed, experimentation, and rigor.
Recalibrate — aligning teams, resources, and measurement to execute at pace.
RIM is not a static plan. It’s a strategic operating rhythm — a way to navigate instability with intention.
Why This Matters Now
Disruption windows are shrinking — what used to be a multi-year threat cycle can now collapse into months.
Technology accelerates change — AI, automation, and platforms enable competitors to move faster than ever.
Customer loyalty is conditional — the moment your offer stops meeting the evolving “job” they need done, they leave.
Old models can still teach us, but they weren’t built for this. The 5 Factors and RIM are.
The Provocation
Strategy used to be about defending your position. Now, it’s about continually repositioning.
Porter’s Five Forces helped us understand the battlefield.
The 5 Factors and RIM help us win when the battlefield won’t stop shifting.
If your organization’s strategy can’t move at the speed of change, it’s not a strategy — it’s a snapshot. And snapshots don’t win in a moving world.
