In the early days of the internet, its prophets preached that it would bring freedom — a specific kind of freedom that they called disintermediation. In addition to being a very attractive buzzword, disintermediation describes the process of cutting out the middle man. Disintermediation, they promised, would get you the best prices on what you wanted to buy, unfettered access to information, and eliminate any and all barriers between you and the product/provider/information that you were looking for.

The role of the middle-man, though, is a time-honored tradition. While examples undeniably go back further, the first example that I think of is traders who used to run ships from Continent A to Continent B, buy a product, hope they didn’t die on the trip back, sell their product for 20x the price they bought it for, and repeat until they were either rich or dead.

This role of the intermediary would later be seen in print media via priests who could read books (although primarily the Bible) and tell you what it said — or at least what they decided you should think it said. This made them some of the earliest editors and gatekeepers of information, and they used it to great effect in controlling local populations.

As literacy became a tool for the common people instead of just second and third sons of noble families, though, things changed. People were able to interpret books for themselves, which gave rise to newspapers, radio, television, etc. In all of these mediums, though, you still had the middleman deciding what you needed to see and why, effectively standing between you and information.

In the same vein, retailers may have stopped risking life and limb, but Macy’s and JCPenny still served the role of the intermediary. They sourced clothing from providers and exercised a level of quality control that, in theory, meant you knew what you were buying and had some amount of certainty in your purchase.

Things are different in the age of the internet, though. Now, I go online and buy things directly from my preferred brand, but this hasn’t resolved all my problems as a consumer; rather, it’s shifted them. Now when I order a shirt, it inevitably arrives either in the wrong size because it uses another country’s sizing chart or it’s of such a poor quality that I’m not realistically going to wear it. Without an intermediary, the impetus is on me to figure out what the right solution is and who I can trust to sell a high-quality product.

We see the same issues in media and information; disinformation has replaced disintermediation as the word of the day, and many consumers aren’t happy with the state of things. People are starting to miss being able to reliably get products and information that has been vetted and provided by an intermediary.

This leads to an important question: Is the pendulum about to swing the other way? Could we be seeing a shift in thinking that leads us back to the era of the intermediary and gives consumers an easier, less stressful way to buy t-shirts and obtain information?

As you’re planning the direction that your business is going, it’s important to be aware of this shift in thinking and to try to position yourself advantageously. This is a broad question, so to avoid going too macro with it, I find it helpful to think about what you can do to anticipate and adapt to these kinds of changes.

For instance, look back at what your industry was doing in, say, 1950. Then ask yourself, what had changed by the time 1975 came around? What about the year 2000? And what will the situation be in 2025? These kinds of broad, major shifts take about a generation to move their way through the zeitgeist and become ingrained.

As you ask yourself these questions, also consider where your business fits in the intermediary vs. no-intermediary debate. Personally, I have a foot in each world, with some businesses that can operate great on the 1-1 exchange and others that function as a middleman for consumers. There isn’t a “better” camp to be in, but if you want to be ready for coming changes, then you certainly need to know which approach you’re currently in, decide where you think the trend is going, and plan accordingly.

So, as you contemplate your next strategic move, remember: Whether you're betting on disintermediation or embracing the comeback of the intermediary, just be sure your business isn't caught standing in the middle of the road. Because that's where you get run over.

If you’re lucky, then you probably spend a lot of your time as a leader or executive knowing, more or less, what you should be doing. But that surety of purpose doesn’t mean that things can’t go off the rails. That’s why it’s important to stay attentive and listen to what the world around you is trying to tell you. Personally, I think of it as listening to the jungle drums.

This harkens back to when I was a kid watching Tarzan in black and white on the TV. When something was happening in the show, drums would play to communicate messages across the jungle. I was enamored with this (to my experience) unconventional means of communication, and now I see a striking resemblance between the world of my career and that of the show.

In leadership, you’re often distanced from your customers. After all, your role is to be high up on the hill for a clearer perspective and use that information to guide your people and point them in the right direction. But while this position is useful, it does make it harder to know what’s going on down in the jungle. Hence the utility of the drums.

But the drums are only useful as long as you’re listening for them, and it’s easy to miss their rhythm if you’re focused on other things.

Specifically, you need to be listening for things that don’t fit your normal paradigm. It can be tempting to dismiss outlying data as a fluke — sales were down on a certain day because it was raining. And while yes, sometimes a blip is just a blip, it’s important not to dismiss it out of hand. If you discount any information that doesn’t coincide with what you already expect, you won’t have any opportunity to adjust course as the weather changes.

So how do you follow up on this data to determine if it’s a fluke or a sign of coming change for which you need to plan?

The best places to start looking are with your customer service logs and your people. Do you see changes in the types of issues that you’re hearing? New objections to price or the quality of your products/services? A significant change in the amount of returns that you’re seeing?

Look for new patterns emerging in the data. Individual data points may not be of any great importance, but trends are what the jungle drums are all about. And when you see them, jump on them to figure out why they’re happening and what you need to do to either prevent a disaster or capitalize on this new opportunity.

I don’t want to keep this entirely theoretical, though, so let me show this concept in action with my own experience of trying to listen to the jungle drums.

Many years ago, our media company was having troubles with one particular delivery route where we had a high volume of complaints coming from one end of the street. We talked to the carrier and our other staff about this, but it never seemed to get resolved (or not for long, at least).

After several rounds of back and forth, we discovered that there was disconnect with a particular manager who was having trouble accurately describing the orders from the top. Hence our company’s repeated mistakes with this part of the route.

If I hadn’t listened to the jungle drums, we might never have figured out what the issue was and just written it off as a fluke. But because I took note of the spike in complaints and didn’t let the short-term fixes be the extent of our response, we discovered a breakdown in communication with our delivery crews and were able to circumvent larger problems before they could grow and start impacting other routes and other customers.

That’s a micro example, but a larger version happened in the 2016 presidential election. Famously, Clinton was projected to have a substantial lead in the polls. But of course, that Tuesday evening in November, many people were stunned to find that things hadn’t gone as they’d anticipated.

A lot of them were left wondering: What happened?

Well, the same thing that happened with our delivery route. There were signs that things weren’t going to work out in Clinton’s favor, but many (not all) pollsters were unable or unwilling to listen to the jungle drums of discontent. Whether that was a good or bad day for you, it’s a strong example of the necessity of listening to the world around you.

So go forth and keep an ear open for the jungle drums. And when you do hear them, don’t let yourself ignore them as background noise or random anomalies. Take them seriously, and use the information they give you to put yourself and your enterprise in as advantageous a position as possible.