Supersonic Flight and the Abundance Mindset: What the NFL's Aerospace Obsession Can Teach Associations

The NFL has been quietly monitoring a supersonic jet company. Not as an investment opportunity. Not as a sponsorship play. League executives have been tracking Boom Supersonic's progress because one technological breakthrough could reshape the entire future of professional football.

That might sound like a stretch. What does aerospace innovation have to do with sports? Everything, it turns out. And the strategic thinking behind the NFL's interest offers a framework that association leaders should pay attention to.

Why the NFL Cares About Breaking the Sound Barrier

The league has been expanding internationally for years. London games are now a mainstay on the schedule, and 2025 saw debuts in Dublin, Berlin, and Madrid. Fan interest is there. Broadcast revenue is there. But permanent European teams face one barrier that no amount of marketing spend can fix: travel time.

A flight from New York to London takes roughly seven hours. Factor in time zone adjustments, player recovery, and competitive fairness, and stationing a team across the Atlantic becomes a logistical nightmare. The math simply doesn't work.

Supersonic flight changes that math entirely.

In January 2025, Boom Supersonic broke the sound barrier with a test plane. It was the first civilian aircraft to do so in over 20 years, since the Concorde retired in 2003. The company's commercial jet aims to carry passengers by 2029, cutting the New York to London trip to under four hours. They already have 130 pre-orders from major airlines.

There's historical precedent for this kind of shift. The Dodgers and Giants only moved from New York to California after transcontinental flights became widely available. Rail travel times made West Coast teams impossible. Once aviation solved the constraint, an entirely new strategic reality opened up.

The NFL isn't dabbling in aerospace because executives got bored. They're watching because a single technological shift could unlock something that's been impossible for decades.

The Abundance Mindset Framework

This way of thinking has a name: the abundance mindset. The concept, popularized by Peter Diamandis in his book Abundance, centers on a simple observation. When the cost of a resource drops toward zero while its capability increases, things that seemed impossible become possible. Sometimes overnight.

Computing power is the classic example. The cost of processing has been cut in half roughly every two years for decades. What once required a room-sized mainframe now fits in your pocket. That single curve enabled everything from smartphones to streaming video to real-time translation.

But computing isn't the only curve accelerating. Energy production, data availability, and now intelligence itself are all following similar trajectories. When multiple curves converge, the downstream effects multiply.

The useful question becomes: what problems get solved when a core constraint disappears?

Take energy. If abundant, clean energy became essentially free tomorrow, what would that unlock? Suddenly water desalination becomes economically viable at massive scale. Manufacturing costs drop. Transportation gets reimagined. Problems that seemed permanently stuck start moving.

These connections aren't always obvious. The NFL watching aerospace innovation doesn't make intuitive sense until you understand that travel time is the constraint blocking their European expansion. Once you see the link, the strategic logic is clear.

Training yourself to spot these connections is where the real leverage lives.

Seek and Destroy Unsolvable Problems

Most strategic planning operates within accepted constraints. You look at your current processes and ask how to make them 15% or 20% more efficient. That's valuable work. It keeps the wheels turning.

But there's a different approach worth considering: actively hunting for problems your organization has accepted as permanently unsolvable.

This concept sits at the top of the strategic flywheel at Blue Cypress, the family of companies Sidecar is part of. The first component of that flywheel is specifically seeking out challenges that require a shift in technology or resource availability to crack. Not problems that are hard. Problems that are currently impossible given existing constraints.

The distinction matters. Hard problems yield to effort, budget, and persistence. Impossible problems don't move no matter how much you throw at them. They're stuck because of a fundamental resource limitation.

Here's a concrete example. Every association says they want world-class member service. Mission statements talk about exceptional experiences. Strategic plans reference member-centric approaches. But if you have 50 staff members serving 20,000 members, you cannot deliver Ritz Carlton-level personalization. You can be responsive. You can be helpful. But researching each member's history, anticipating their needs, and providing concierge-level care? The math doesn't work. That's not a failure of effort or will. It's a resource constraint.

Now consider what becomes possible when AI can research a member's history, check their registration status, review past communications, and synthesize context in 90 seconds. When a system can provide that concierge-level response to every inquiry, regardless of volume. The constraint disappears.

The problem was unsolvable until suddenly it wasn't.

This is what makes the current moment different from previous waves of technology adoption. We're not talking about doing existing things slightly faster. We're talking about doing things that were genuinely impossible becoming routine.

What's Your Supersonic Moment?

The NFL identified their unsolvable problem years ago: European teams can't work with current travel times. They didn't sit around hoping for a solution. They actively monitored adjacent industries for shifts that might change the equation. When Boom Supersonic started making real progress, they were paying attention.

Association leaders can apply the same approach. Start by identifying the strategic goals you've shelved because the underlying constraint seemed permanent. Not the projects that got deprioritized for budget reasons. The ones where everyone agreed the barrier was structural.

A few questions worth sitting with:

If geographic constraints disappeared, how would your conference strategy change? Maybe you've limited your event footprint because travel costs and time commitments reduce attendance from certain regions. What if members could get anywhere in half the current time at comparable cost?

If unlimited personalized communication became possible, how would your member engagement model shift? Most associations batch their outreach because individualized communication doesn't scale. What if it did? What if every member could receive guidance tailored to their specific career stage, interests, and history with your organization?

What would you attempt if expertise were abundant rather than scarce? Perhaps you've avoided launching a resource in a specialized area because you lack staff with that knowledge. What if subject matter expertise could be captured, structured, and deployed at scale?

Which member complaints have you learned to live with? Sometimes organizations accept friction because solving it seems disproportionately expensive. Response times, navigation complexity, information accessibility. Which of those frictions might dissolve with new capabilities?

Consider running a "seek and destroy" exercise at your next board retreat or leadership offsite. Spend an hour brainstorming the problems everyone has accepted as unsolvable. Get them on a whiteboard. Then pressure-test each one: is the constraint actually still real? Has something changed in the past 18 months that might make this solvable now? What would we need to be true for this barrier to break?

You might find that some of those "impossible" problems are ready to move.

Casting a Wider Net

One more lesson from the NFL's approach: they're not in the aerospace business, but they're paying attention to it. They recognized that a breakthrough in a completely different industry could directly affect what's possible for them.

Associations can fall into a pattern of only monitoring their own sector. You track what peer organizations are doing. You watch for regulatory changes in your industry. You attend conferences with people who do similar work. That's all necessary.

But transformative change often arrives from adjacent or seemingly unrelated fields. AI didn't emerge from the association world. Neither did mobile technology, or social media, or any of the other shifts that reshaped how organizations operate over the past two decades.

The question isn't whether to become an expert in aerospace or biotechnology or energy. It's whether you have some mechanism for noticing when a breakthrough in one of those areas might unlock something in yours.

The abundance mindset is a practical tool for this. Instead of trying to track every development in every field, you can work backward. Identify your biggest constraints first. Then ask: what shift in technology or resources would make this constraint disappear? That tells you where to pay attention.

Your Supersonic Moment Might Already Be Here

The Concorde retired in 2003. For over two decades, no civilian aircraft flew faster than the speed of sound. The problem seemed settled. Supersonic commercial flight was a thing of the past.

Then Boom broke the sound barrier in January 2025, and suddenly a 50-year constraint started to crack.

Associations have their own version of this. Problems that seemed permanently stuck. Constraints that everyone accepted as just the way things are. Member expectations you couldn't possibly meet. Personalization you couldn't possibly deliver. Expertise you couldn't possibly scale.

Some of those constraints are no longer real. The shift has already happened. The question is whether you've noticed, and whether you're ready to act on it.

The NFL didn't wait for supersonic flight to become mainstream before thinking about what it might mean for their strategy. They're positioning now, while the window is open.

Your supersonic moment might already be here. The only question is whether you recognize it.