The Red Queen’s Gift: How CX Leaders Can Transform Constant Change Into Compounding Advantage
The most transformative CX pathways don't exist yet; the leaders who will create them aren't the ones with perfect roadmaps, but those willing to experiment at the edges of what seems impossible today
Some of the best analogies for technological revolution come from classic literature, like the Red Queen’s Race from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. Picture Alice, running full speed beside the Red Queen, trees and hedges blurring past, feet pounding, lungs burning—only to stop and discover she’s in exactly the same spot. “You’d generally get to somewhere else,” Alice protests, “if you run very fast for a long time.” The Queen laughs: “A slow sort of country! Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”
When biologists study the Cambrian explosion—that extraordinary moment 540 million years ago when life suddenly exploded from simple forms into breathtaking complexity—they invoke the Red Queen hypothesis. Once ecosystems reached a threshold of complexity, evolution became self-reinforcing. Every adaptation created pressure on others. Species that stopped evolving vanished.
The no-so-radical reality is that no organism at the beginning could have predicted what would emerge. The first creature to develop light-sensitive cells couldn’t have imagined the eagle’s eye. The earliest filter-feeders couldn’t have conceived of complex digestive systems. The Cambrian explosion didn’t just create more species—it created entirely new categories of possibility. Body plans that had never existed. Sensory capabilities that opened access to previously invisible dimensions of reality.
We’re at exactly that moment in customer experience right now.
AI won’t just making existing CX better—it’ll create the conditions for experiences we literally cannot conceive of today. Five years ago, could you have imagined conversational AI handling complex service scenarios autonomously? Or, AI generating contextualized video content in real-time? How about systems orchestrating seamless handoffs based on real-time contextual awareness?
It seems that the most transformative innovations emerge from combination, not extrapolation. Eyes didn’t evolve from better light sensitivity alone—they required photoreceptors, focusing mechanisms, neural processing, and structural support working together. The most revolutionary CX experiences ahead won’t come from making chatbots 10% better. They’ll emerge from the intersection of AI, ambient computing, spatial technology, biometric sensing, and technologies that don’t exist in practical form yet.
What might these unimaginable pathways look like?
Perhaps CX won’t be about touch points at all, but continuous ambient presence—where customers aren’t outside of the ecosystem - and surveilled - but are an intricate part of the value chain. Perhaps even the current concept of “customer service” will dissolve entirely, replaced by deeply integrated value co-creation that provides continuous feedback loops that enhance the entire ecosystem. Perhaps we’ll discover that AI-augmented human agents can create entirely new forms of connection that neither humans nor AI could achieve alone.
The honest answer? We don’t know. And that’s the point.
The Cambrian explosion didn’t follow a predictable pathway. It was wild experimentation where countless variations were tried, most failed, and the survivors opened up possibility spaces that compounded over time.
What does this mean for visionary CX leadership?
Stop planning for known destinations. Your five-year roadmap is almost certainly wrong—not because you’re bad at planning, but because the destination will shift faster than you can map it. Build organizations optimized for exploration.
Experiment at the edges of impossibility. Your breakthrough won’t come from optimizing the known; it will come from testing the seemingly impractical. What would you attempt if you knew capabilities would arrive that you can’t yet name?
Watch for convergence moments. The magic isn’t in individual technologies—it’s in their intersections. Position yourself at the convergence points where something genuinely new becomes possible.
The CX pathways that will define the next decade don’t exist yet. They’re waiting to be discovered by leaders willing to experiment, to combine capabilities in novel ways, to pursue possibilities that sound absurd today.
Your customers will have experiences in five years that neither you nor they can currently imagine. The question is whether your organization will be one of the pioneers creating those unimaginable experiences, or whether you’ll be playing catch-up to possibilities others discovered first.
The most exciting CX pathways aren’t on any roadmap. They’re waiting in the adjacent possible, just beyond what we can currently see.
Are you ready to discover them?