The Jevons Paradox and What It Means for Your Business Right Now
Why the hardest seasons often trigger the biggest expansions, and why this matters more than ever in a market that's changing faster than most people can track.
In 1865, a British economist named William Stanley Jevons noticed something that made no logical sense.
Steam engines had just become significantly more efficient. They were using less coal to do the same amount of work. By every reasonable calculation, coal consumption should have dropped. It didn't. It exploded. More industries opened up. More expansion happened. More output than anyone had predicted became possible. Not despite the efficiency, but because of it.
Jevons wrote it up. We now call it the Jevons Paradox: the observation that when a resource becomes more efficient to use, total consumption of that resource tends to increase, not decrease. Efficiency doesn't shrink demand. It opens possibilities that didn't previously exist.
I've been thinking about this for months. Not because of coal, but because of what's happening in business right now, and because I've been living a version of this paradox myself.
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The last few years of my life looked, from the outside, like exactly the kind of season that contracts a business. Divorce. Rebuilding. Co-parenting two teenagers. Holding everything together externally while reorganising everything internally. By most people's calculations (and I mean the actual people in my life, not abstract ones) something should have broken. My capacity should have shrunk. I should have put things on hold.
The opposite happened.
My business expanded. Not in spite of the pressure, but in some way I still find hard to fully articulate, because of it. The constraint forced a different kind of thinking. The necessity of systems and infrastructure, things I'd been building towards, became urgent rather than aspirational. I discovered a level of capacity I genuinely didn't know I had. The efficiency I was forced into didn't diminish output. It multiplied it.
My business up-levelled during the hardest season of my life. It was sink or swim. And the systems I'd built are a large part of why I swam.
My mother has said for years that if I fell in something unpleasant, I'd come up smelling of roses. I used to take that as a personality observation. I'm starting to think it's actually structural.
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Here's where this gets interesting for your business, and for the market you're operating in right now.
We are watching the Jevons Paradox play out in real time across entire industries.
AI is the obvious example. The logic goes: AI makes knowledge work more efficient, therefore fewer people will be needed, therefore demand for expert consultants, coaches, and service providers will fall. That's the fear version of the story. But it's not what Jevons would predict, and it's not what I'm seeing.
When a resource becomes more efficient, when it becomes easier to produce certain kinds of content, analysis, or output, it doesn't eliminate demand for expertise. It tends to expand what's possible, raise the floor of what's expected, and increase the value of the things that can't be automated. Judgment. Relationship. Specificity. Context that took years to accumulate.
The businesses that will struggle are the ones whose value proposition was essentially: I will do the thing that is now cheap to replicate. The businesses that will expand are the ones whose value proposition is: I understand your specific situation well enough to know what actually needs to happen and I've built something around that.
That's not a comfortable observation if you've been selling access to information. But it's an accurate one.
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There's a second version of this paradox that's less talked about and more personal.
I work with established experts, coaches, and business owners: people who have been running businesses for years and are good at what they do. Many of them come to me in seasons that look, from the outside, like they should be contracting. A model that used to work and doesn't anymore. A market that shifted. Life, health, bereavement, menopause, a relationship ending, children demanding more, energy that isn't what it was.
The conventional advice is to manage through it. Reduce the load. Wait until things stabilise before attempting anything significant.
I think that's sometimes exactly wrong.
What I've seen, in my own business and in the businesses I work with, is that constraint, when it's met with the right infrastructure, often triggers a Jevons response. The inefficiency gets forced out. The things that were taking effort without producing result get dropped, not because someone decided to drop them, but because there's simply no capacity left to carry them. What remains is clearer. More precise. Often more effective.
The season that looks like it's breaking you might be doing something else entirely.
There's a capacity inside you that you haven't discovered yet. Pressure has a way of finding it for you, if the structure is there to catch it.
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This is why I'm so focused on infrastructure. Not as a business concept, but as something closer to a capacity and expansion strategy. The kind that means your business can operate when you're not at full capacity. Revenue that isn't entirely contingent on your ability to perform this week. Client relationships built on your methodology, not just your personality. Assets rather than just effort.
When your life happens, and for a lot of the people I work with that moment either has come or will come, the infrastructure is what determines whether you contract or expand. Whether the pressure diminishes you or activates something you didn't know was there.
Jevons was writing about coal and steam engines. But the paradox applies anywhere that efficiency meets possibility. And right now, in a market being reshaped by AI, by shifting buyer behaviour, by the slow collapse of visibility-as-a-strategy. The question isn't whether things are changing. They are. The question is whether your business is structured to expand into the change, or whether it's dependent on conditions that no longer exist.
I know which one I'm building for. I know which one my clients are building for.
What about you?
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