Some cicadas spend seventeen years underground, for no apparent reason, only to emerge all at once and disappear weeks later.
It's no accident: it's one of the most elegant survival strategies in existence against a predator that learned to predict them. Our companies have a lot to learn from this behavior if they don't want to be devoured.
In the eastern United States there are cicadas that only come to the surface every 13 or 17 years. Not every 10, not every 15, not every 18. The rest of the time they live underground.
For a long time those numbers seemed arbitrary, but in 1966 entomologists Monte Lloyd and Henry Dybas proposed a simple yet fascinating explanation: 13 and 17 are prime numbers. If a cicada emerged every 12 years, it would periodically coincide with any predator on a 2-, 3-, 4-, or 6-year cycle. But a 13- or 17-year cycle would almost never cross paths with them, because the overlap would only repeat every several decades, an interval so long that in practice they never sync up.
The cicada doesn't hide underground; it hides in arithmetic.
There is no strategy more effective than the one your predator can't anticipate.
This logic of avoiding syncing up with whoever is waiting for you has an almost literal translation in any business strategy, though almost nobody puts it that way. And it isn't just the launch date of your next product. It's the industry you decide to enter without ever having been there before. It's the technology you've been quietly betting on for two years while the rest of the sector looks the other way. It's the hire nobody, not the competition and sometimes not even the board, saw coming. When the market can anticipate not only when you'll move but where, it stops being your move: it becomes the starting point someone else uses to build their own strategy.
Launch calendars so fixed and repeated year after year that a competitor can schedule its own announcement to steal your headline a week earlier. An expansion pattern so recognizable that anyone can guess the next sector you'll enter before you announce it. A technology bet that's already being discussed at industry conferences months before it's ready. A type of hire that always fits the same profile and the same talent pool, so everyone already knows who you'll call next time. The advantage evaporates the instant someone else can anticipate the when, the what, the where, or the with whom.
The underlying reason is exactly the cicada's. It isn't speed or the size of the organization that determines whether you get caught. It's whether your next move (when, where, with what bet, and with whom) can be deduced in advance.
In 2006, Amazon, which to the public was still mostly an online bookstore, launched Amazon Web Services: cloud computing infrastructure it had quietly built over years to solve its own scaling problems at Christmas. Neither Google nor Microsoft, which had been the technology benchmarks for decades, saw it coming that a book retailer would become the largest server provider on the planet. Today AWS generates a substantial share of all of Amazon's operating profit, in many years more than e-commerce itself, and forced two tech giants to spend years chasing a bookstore.
Sun Tzu wrote it 2,500 years ago in "The Art of War": attack where the enemy is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.
Now, the cicada doesn't survive by being chaotic either. It still has a fixed, disciplined cycle that is absolutely reliable for itself; it just doesn't coincide with that of whoever hunts it. That's the nuance that often gets lost when people talk about "breaking predictability": it's not about eliminating all rhythm, but about separating the rhythm that must remain reliable (such as payroll, payments, keeping promises, or internal communication) from the one that shouldn't be so legible to anyone watching from outside looking to gain an advantage: the timing of a launch, the industry it suddenly decides to compete in, the technology it has long been quietly betting on, the profile it hires without anyone seeing it coming.
Apple has spent more than a decade religiously announcing its products every September, with no attempt to hide the date. But that calendar predictability is precisely what lets it shield the one thing that really matters: what it will present. The "when" is ritual and builds anticipation; the "what" is guarded with the same discipline with which a cicada doesn't reveal its cycle until the last minute.
Organizations that manage this tension well sacrifice the applause of a countdown published months in advance, that announcement that generates short-term anticipation, for something less flashy: the ability to make a move and catch the market with its guard down.
Thirteen years underground look, from the outside, like a wasted eternity. But it is exactly that time out of rhythm that makes it so that, when the cicada finally emerges, nobody is waiting for it.
By Gabriel Weinstein, partner at Olivia.