How the Strategic Fittest Turn Disruption Into Advantage

The stronger your core, the harder it is to build the next growth curve. Adobe and Figma prove it: same disruption, same AI, and only one turned it into growth.

AI has made intelligence cheap. Every competitor can see the same disruption at the same time. Advantage now belongs to the Strategic Fittest: the companies that turn disruption into the next growth curve while the core still pays the bills.

Figma shows what that looks like.

Adobe and Figma faced the same shift: software can now produce images, layouts, and designs at near-zero cost. Both responded. Figma turned it into new growth. Adobe used it to defend the business already under pressure.

Over three years, Figma has grown revenue by nearly 40% a year. Adobe, about 10%. Both sell seats, but they sit on different sides of the shift. Adobe monetizes creative production, the part now under pressure. Figma monetizes the shared workspace around the work, which becomes more valuable as teams move faster.

The operating results already show the difference. The stock prices do not. Both fell over the past year, and Figma fell further. That says more about what the market can measure today than which company is building the stronger growth position. Current earnings are visible. The next curve is not, until it begins to show up in the market share.

The stronger signal is which company is expanding the market, strengthening its business model, and building the next source of growth, rather than which stock fell less in the short term.

The Innovator’s Paradox

Converting disruption while the current business still pays the bills is the hard part, and most incumbents get it wrong.

In my book, I call it the Innovator’s Paradox: when breakthrough innovation is forced through the systems and processes built to protect the core, the core neutralizes it.

Most organizations are built for predictability, not possibility. They protect the position they have and the methods that created it.

The system neutralizes innovation by design: rewarding efficiency, punishing variance, and forcing uncertainty through gates built to reduce risk. Breakthrough work is slowed, starved of capital, or reshaped into something safe enough to approve, usually after the opportunity has passed.

“The rational choice is often the value-destroying one: protect what pays the bills, and contain what could replace it in pilots that never scale.”

Disrupting your own margins is hard, and here the profitable core starts working against you. It becomes the gravity that pulls capital back toward the position already winning, at the exact moment that position is being commoditized. The healthier the core, the harder the pull. That’s the innovators' paradox and your leadership problem.

Across the INSTRATE Global 200, benchmarked companies in eleven sectors show this split. Seeing the disruption tells you almost nothing about who wins. Converting it, while the core still pays, is the difference. The line is already being drawn in today’s decisions.

Adobe bought back its past. Figma built the next curve.

Both AI efforts are real. The results are opposite poles.

Adobe’s AI is strong. Generative Fill in Photoshop is best in class. Yet AI-first revenue is still under 2% of its book, and total revenue growth is near 10% per year.

Their biggest move under pressure, a 25-billion-dollar buyback, went back into its own shares rather than into a new business. Then the CEO moved to Chairman and the CFO left, mid-pivot. The AI became a feature, and the curve did not move.

Figma’s AI is strong too, and it lands somewhere else: the collaboration itself, the shared canvas, the comments, the handoff to developers, which AI makes more useful, not obsolete. Revenue went from a billion in 2025 to a guided 1.37 billion in 2026, representing nearly 40% growth. Its capital and leadership adopted an AI-first strategy to enhance its strengths.

In this scenario, the market read is not helping to identify the winners. Markets are forward-looking. They price the future they can measure. Right now, the measurable fact is the disruption. AI is commoditizing creative work, and it sits in both stocks.

Which leadership team resolves the paradox and converts that threat into the next curve is really up for grabs right now. It depends on the capital decisions being made today. The advantage gets built long before the price can see it.

What the strategic fittest do differently

The gap is three decisions, taken in opposite directions. Across the Global 200 benchmark, these are the three that separate the companies converting disruption from the ones defending against it.

1. Where the AI goes. The fittest use it to open new revenue curves as part of the new core business. Everyone else uses it to defend revenue and optimize the core. The same core AI is taking away. That is Figma’s 40% against Adobe’s 10%.

2. How you fund the new growth. The fittest give it dedicated, ring-fenced capital, people, and targets, so the core cannot starve it. Adobe ran its reinvention inside the business it was meant to replace, and sent its largest capital decision back to the old one. Figma had one bet, the new curve, and funded only that.

3. When you move the money. The fittest move it early, while the core still pays, not after the numbers force it. Adobe waited and defended. Figma is moving while it still leads.

   
   

The Standard

Pressure-test your own leadership against the same three questions.

• Is your AI opening new revenue and expanding the market, or primarily defending revenue the same technology is putting under pressure?

• Does the next growth curve have its own capital, people, authority, and targets, or can the core starve it out? Are you moving resources while the core is still strong, or waiting for the numbers to force the decision?

• Consider the strongest competitor in your market. Suppose it rebuilt its business around this disruption tomorrow, committed capital to the next curve, and accepted pressure on the current quarter. Would your leadership match the move while it still mattered?

  
  

That distance is the difference between converting disruption into advantage or losing the next curve.

I am forming a founding circle of CEOs, boards, and capital partners around the Strategic Fitness standard. Start with the diagnostic, scored against the INSTRATE Global Benchmark 200. If it exposes a material strategic gap, I will walk you through the results.