My own transformative dynamics of disruption

I can honestly say I have been back at school for the past months. This remote learning stuff has been hard, challenging but stimulating.

Let me tell you about this as it recognises how things are changing in our world and certainly in my world, in particular. It is a very disrupting, disturbing world.

We often make what amounts to a series of mistakes, constantly extrapolating the present and layering it onto a way we see the future, based on what we know or are reluctant to give up. I’m afraid that’s not right, sometimes painfully wrong in lost time, investment and sudden realisation.

We are doing nothing but constraining the change occurring all around us at a limited pace and speed by placing the wrong lens on this.

We make what we see as linear in trajectories, full of incremental change, but we need to see that our changes are non-linear across the dimensions of scope, speed, and scale that deliver a very different impact to us all.

Extraction versus Exploring- shifting the dynamics

For me, so often in the past, I have relied on an extraction base to deliver services, advice or insights. This has been partly based on my own experiences, combined with a constant update of building up knowledge, valued as a scarce resource.

This extraction base worked, actually, it still does in providing knowledge often unfound internally in a client, yet the real future value is in the ability to “see” new combinations, to create different, unique value combinations that span borders or challenge orthodoxy far more. This becomes more of a creative need, of searching and spending far more “essential” time piecing together potential unique combinations; that’s the future key to unlock.

I wrote about the “cascading effect” for innovation as “a sequence of events in which each produces the circumstances necessary for the initiation of the next”. In many ways, this article perpetuates linear advice only, less on the spanning borders need. We have to push this into more of the cross-sector cascading effects of disruptions.

We need to challenge conventional (present) conventional analysis, specialising in one sector or discipline; we must achieve cross-sector synergies and interactions and forge more complex interconnection. This becomes a critical point of any dynamics of future disruption.

Now I have seen this need for more interconnection, I have written consistently about it, but in these last few months, I have been learning to swallow my own medicine; to recognize I am being disrupted more than I realised by not recognizing the forces ‘at play’ that are around me. Intelligence gathering is shaping-up in a very different way

My own pace of change needs to speed up. I need to stretch and scale differently than in the past. I have written about the five essential sense-making steps in any transition.

The age of “technology attack.”

In many ways, we are in the age of “technology attack”. There are so many disruptive technologies converging; we are entering that exponential phase on the S-Curve. How will smaller “independents” leverage all the different technologies? That concerns me, will I be at a disadvantage?
The S-shaped growth curve(sigmoid growth curve) is a pattern of growth in which, in a new environment, the density of an organism increases slowly initially, in a positive acceleration phase; then increases rapidly, approaching an exponential growth rate as in the J-shaped curve; but then stabilizes at some future point of time.

Cutting through the Gordian Knot

For people the world over, the Gordian Knot represents the difficult, the intractable and often the insolvable problem. Those are increasingly highly complex ones that need radical solutions to be applied.

Today’s systemic business problems are the modern-day equivalent of this seemingly impossible challenge, our Gordian Knots to untie or cut through.

So my first point here is that in my transformation recognition, we are all in a very different environment today.

Technological disruption is altering all we do.

This environmental change by disruptive technologies has forced us all to accelerate our interactions and interconnections. These are not only in our own worlds but are driving us across this cross-sector understanding to find and create new value creation that requires the connections technology gives us.

I have been thinking about relationships and network management for some time.

I have been exploring the nurturing effect of networks within firms within the innovation ecosystem, for example.

I broke out my ecosystem thinking some time ago and given this an increasing dedicated focus within the shift towards our need to adopt new business models and value chain understanding.

The use and leveraging of technology within my own work needs to take on a much higher aspect than I have been appreciating, and I thought I was doing a good job, but on reflection, perhaps I have not.

My second point of understanding of transformation dynamics.

Earlier, I spoke of layering on linearly; I was doing just that in my writing and thinking. Until earlier this year, I was determined to still keep”banging away” about the merits of innovation, ever hopeful, even with years of promoting innovation as a core need.

I did not recognise or chose to ignore how much this was becoming a “commodity space” for anyone. General noise was drowning out specific messages.

So I have been faced with a stark choice, swim harder and better in a crowded innovation pool, or recognize a different ocean to swim in. An ocean that had better undercurrents to separate me and my work, ones that can certainly move me along in more satisfying and rewarding ways and provide a better client value in creating value.

I felt a need to step out of generally “preaching” about innovation into offering innovating advice very specifically. This focuses on given sectors that are in periods of rapid disruption phases and innovative evolution.

The Energy Transformation was my absolute “tops” in focus, passion and recognition. This was the most disruptive space for innovation and technology to be applied.

Much of my recent time, well over 24 months of dedicated efforts have gone into an intense dive and expansion of knowledge and understanding of this energy transition underway.

I have a posting site and a separate website built progressively in the past year or more to build out my credentials, validation, and, more importantly, value points I can offer in insights, knowledge, and understanding that piecing together those multiple strands necessary.

Then the whole 4th Industrial Revolution that is shifting the industry from ‘islands of expertise’ into ‘networks of collaborations’ was my next point of focus, connecting industrial IoT by offering a growing reference and engagement platform that supports the changes occurring.

Then recently recognised that digital runs through all we are doing. I decided to apply this digital thinking specifically to the energy transition by putting digital into energy and transforming energy with this different digital mindset.

So today, I have shifted from a monotone on (simply) innovation preservation or incremental advancement into a richer ‘sonorous tone’ of understanding. Giving a greater depth, hopefully, richness and specialisation in what I offer.

My third point of disruptive understanding

Any disruptive forces are highly transforming, they form new patterns of understanding and value creation potential, but they need a totally different design and structure.

I became more convinced we need more ideological vista’s in any major transformation; they allow an “anchor to be dropped” to stop any drift or casting around, often out of control or not knowing where to head. I provide some course setting and fresh direction.

For example, many industries or sectors face dwindling demand, escalating costs, plummeting market share or significant switching over costs, and challenges in placing a new investment. There is a lot of disruptive transition work, even for those who might feel they are in a safe place; this is a very disrupting world at present.

The shifts from fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) into renewables (wind, solar and storage) are massive in implications and repositioning. The reversing of scale, the shift from one (Fossil) to the other (renewables), is complex and highly disrupting.

The battle of applying “band-aids” and arguing for interim solutions to hold onto or patch up the old energy systems, boils down to growing conventional blindness.

There is a gathering of reductionists looking to have a narrow mindset promoting linear progression and not “seeing” the disruptive forces of radical change in the energy transformation; they are holding on far too much to the incumbent system.

We need to prevent collapse or a sudden shift from one well established existing energy system without having a robust alternative in place, that is for sure, but any emergent system thinking is highly different from conventional thinking.

We need to balance time, attention, and capital spent is becoming more important as we invest between the old and new. What is forcing something to prevail and hold on, and what accelerates the change?

This is my third personal learning point. I have (very) limited time, attention, and capital to deploy, so I need to search harder and be more selective for optimal intervention points.

So, I need to be selective and provide as my VP this course setting and fresh direction as my primary focal point of offering.

My fourth disruptive dynamic- where I am going.

To extend and deepen my innovation understanding into specific topics or areas, tgst are undergoing transformation at a far more dynamic level.

I have needed to seek out convergence and disruption far more in what needs agreement to change. I need to build into my work more feedback loops signalling change.

This comes back to shifting from the extraction model that requires scale and reach, which is a limiting factor for me, into a ‘greater’ creation-based system that takes the “abundance” of inputs available into a more generative model that points towards fresh value creation.

For this, I need to push harder myself into a different mindset, a more problem-orientation one, searching for new value pools, where convergence in technologies and human ingenuity are combining.

Providing a generative model as my point of value

This generative model offers to expand space, providing different alternatives based on “seeing” patterns, synergies and different connections.

These alternatives provide plausible and new potential as they open up thinking to cross-sector and avenues of convergence, moving from divergent (established and existing thinking) to convergent, as shown in this workshop model I have often used.

So our world, well, certainly my world, is more distributed, interconnected and networked, hence my ecosystem focus.

Most importantly, as we search for the disruption, we need to look at increasing at more “edges” as this is where the new emerging value lies. It is where disruption mostly comes or emerges from, from these experimental edges, not from the existing middle or core. It is tough to see change and apply it where established mindsets and (often) rigidity are at their highest.

Applying my own journey of dynamics of transformation is making everything highly disruptive at this time- I need to embrace this.

This journey has taught me how to unlearn and see things differently, not in reducing complexity but in looking at the multiple parts that can build as a whole.

I am arguing increasingly that everything has to be understood about the whole or the sum of its parts. It is recombining them that offers greater value creation.
This applies the theory of holistic perspective, which helps us understand what is going on and what we really mean or refer to when we interact and communicate with each other.

There is a lot of complexity within disruption. I need to focus increasingly on the transformative dynamics of disruptions as my value point.

I quickly summarized an article I came across four years ago, by Estevao Seccatto Rocha, my post on this “preparing for digital within your disruption“. Estevao offered this: “Disruption change people’s routines, the way people think, behave, do business and learn; it “displaces an existing market, industry, or technology and produces something new and more efficient and worthwhile. It is at once destructive and creative.”

I am on a journey of change; it has rupturing points of letting go, new architectural thinking potential and unfolding disruption points that make me uncomfortable but curious.

Yet, I firmly believe transformation is necessary to work through these disruption dynamics for my own meaningful future.