• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, June 13, 2017

So, here’s the question: Could Sears -- the retail giant that has become the poster child for the death of mall-based retail shopping -- have saved itself?

This is an important question, because I don’t think Sears' downward trend is an isolated incident.

In 2006, historian Richard Longstreth explored the rise and fall of Sears. The rise is well chronicled. From the store's beginnings in 1886, the team of Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck grew to dominate the catalog mail order landscape. They prospered by creating a new way of shopping that catered specifically to the rural market of America, a rapidly expanding opportunity created by the Homestead Act of 1862.

The spread of railroads across the continent through the 1860s and '70s allowed Sears to distribute physical goods across the nation. This, combined with its quality guarantee and free return policy, allowed the retailer to grow to rapidly to a position of dominance.

In the 1920s and '30s, Robert E. Wood, the fourth president of Sears, took the company in a new direction. He reimagined the concept of a physical retail store, convincing the reluctant company to expand from its very lucrative catalog business.

This move was directly driven by Sear’s foundation as a mail-order business. In essence, Woods was hedging his bet. He built his stores far from downtown business centers, where land was cheap.  And, if they failed as retail destinations, they could always be repurposed as mail-order distribution and fulfillment centers. 

But Wood got lucky. Just about the time he made this call, America fell in love with the automobile. They didn’t mind driving a little bit to get to a store where they could save some money. This was followed by the suburbanization of America. When America moved to the suburbs, Sears was already there.

So, you could say Sears was amazingly smart with its strategy, presciently predicting two massive disruptions in the history of consumerism in America. Or you could also say that Sears got lucky and the market happened to reward it -- twice. In the language of evolution, two fortuitous mutations of Sears led to it being naturally selected by the marketplace.

But, as Longstreth showed, the company's luck ran out on the third disruption: the move to online shopping.

A recent article looking back at Longstreth’s paper is titled “Could Sears Have Avoided Becoming Obsolete?"

I believe the answer is no. The article points to one critical strategic flaw as the reason for Sear’s non-relevance: doubling down on its mall anchor strategy as the world stopped going to malls. In hindsight, this seems correct, but the fact is, it was no longer in Sears' DNA to pivot into new retail opportunities. it couldn’t have jumped on the ecommerce bandwagon, just as a whale can’t learn how to fly.

It’s easy for historians to cast a gaze backwards and find reasons for organizational failure, just as it’s easy to ascribe past business success to a brilliant strategy or a visionary CEO.

But the fact is, as business academic Phil Rosenzweig shows in his masterful book "The Halo Effect," we’re just trying to jam history into a satisfying narrative. And narratives crave cause and effect. We look for mistakes that lead to obsolescence. This gives us the illusion that we could avoid the same fate we're smarter.

It's not that simple, though There are bigger forces at play here.  And they can be found at the Edge of Chaos.

Edge of Chaos Theory

In his book, "Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos," Roger Lewin chronicles the growth of the Santa Fe Institute, an academic think tank dedicated to exploring complexity for the last 33 years.

But the “big idea” in Lewin’s book is the Edge of Chaos Theory, a term coined by mathematician Doyne Farmer to describe a discovery by computer scientist Christopher Langton.

The theory, in its simplest form, is this: On one side you have chaos, where there is just too much dynamic activity and instability for anything sustainable to emerge. On the other side you have order, where rules and processes are locked in and things become frozen solid. These are two very different states that can apply to biology, sociology, chemistry, physics, economics -- pretty much any field you can think of.

To go from one state -- in either direction -- is a phase transition. Everything changes when you move from one to the other.  On one side, turmoil crushes survivability. On the other, inertia smothers change.

But in between is a razor-thin interface, balanced precipitously on the edge of chaos. Theorists believe that it’s in this delicate interface where life forms, where creativity happens and where new orders are born.

For any single player, it’s almost impossible to maintain this delicate balance. As organizations grow, I think they naturally move from chaos to order, at some point moving through this exceptional interface where the magic happens.

Some companies manage to move through this space a few times. Apple is such a company. Sears probably moved through the space twice, once in setting its mail-order business up and once with its move to suburban retail.

But sooner or later, organizations go through their typical life cycle and inevitably choose order over chaos. At this point, their DNA solidifies to the point where they can no longer rediscover the delicate interface between the two.

It’s at the market level where we truly see the Edge of Chaos theory play out. The theory contests that adaptive systems in which there is feedback continually adapt to the Edge of Chaos. But, as in any balancing act, it’s a very dynamic process. In the case of sociological evolution, it’s often a force (or convergence of forces) of technology that catalyzes the phase transition from order back to chaos.

This is especially true when we look at markets. But this is an oscillation between order and chaos, with the market switching from phases of consolidation and verticalization to phases of chaos and sweeping horizontal activation. Markets will swing back and forth but will constantly be rewarding winners that live closest to the edge between the two states.

We all love to believe that immortality can be captured in our corporate form, whether it be our company or our own body. But history shows that we all have a natural life cycle. We may be lucky enough to extend our duration in that interface on the edge of chaos, but sooner or later our time there will end. Just as it did with Sears.