It seems in all I keep reading that we are being extorted to disrupt our enterprises before someone else does.

The constant threat of both those known to us and those unknown competitors who can simply raise money based on a disruptive concept, provide a different business model and then attack tomorrow. It is not a comfortable feeling is it?

We are told It is in our ‘complacency’ that we are losing our competitive advantages, even face extinction from those that attack and tear down, replacing it with something different and supposedly better. Did we really need it?

Can we learn to adapt as fast as all that is seemingly coming toward us?

There is so much disruptive power being harnessed that we are all facing an exponentially more complex and challenging environment. Why is there seemingly this determination to tear down many parts of the fabric of our society by challenging institutions, businesses and government structures?
Are many of these organizations so bad – inefficient granted, complacent most likely, and complicit in holding onto what they have achieved, most definitely. So arguably many can be rightfully challenged but what will be the eventual price for this disruption that is occurring all around us?

Unhealthy shifts in the chase for economic growth
The shift has placed the emphasis on the role of destruction rather than creation in driving different economic activity in present times. Will that change? This is getting uncomfortable, is this good for you or me, perhaps not?

This is becoming the game for a few to make money, I mean big serious money and are these not so worried over the wealth creation aspects of creating jobs, building communities, cherishing certain values or just recognizing those communities built up over many years can just shut down and life moves on?

Whole communities are being disrupted, left derelict, with hope changing to hopelessness; we are seeing a lot of social destruction, wrought by much of this current chase for change that is blowing through our global businesses.

The balance seems out of whack but from whose perspective? The incumbent or the usurper? what about the employee or the society that built up whole communities, reliant on that firm for its very existence. What are we destroying in the name of progress?

Looking for the trillion-dollar disruption or seeing whole industries being wiped out

So we will be seeing not just the young start-up rapidly scaling and replacing larger incumbents but new trillion-dollar businesses emerging, wiping out other trillion-dollar businesses, this is a foretaste of the disruption to come even more than we are already witnessing.

Presently we are having to deal as much with fear and anxiety as we are scratching our heads and absorbing this pace of change, all driven by technology and the flow of money into it

Big Data and harnessing technology seems to be threatening everyone in its path
The ramping up of rhetoric around Big Data certainly is fueling this angst of fear and anxiety but is pointing us towards the changing landscape we are travelling towards.

Clearly, the emergence of Big Data is a phenomenon we can’t ignore. But will it disrupt as much as being talked about, or just simply allow the incumbents in the marketplace to respond and adjust their businesses to accommodate this? Time has an impact that is immediate, but also it has an influence on our futures.

A McKinsey study finds French companies that have undergone thorough digital transformations may unlock revenue gains of up to 40 per cent, while companies that do not quickly become digitally integrated could lose up to 20 per cent of revenue to competitors, now that is significant by any account.

Harnessing technology, adapting business models, exploiting data, scaling fast all become vital to adaptive infrastructures, even I’m told building stacked ecosystems, all modular, layered, highly granular and extendable as you go, are the requirements within this disruptive world to thrive.

Increased rhetoric is not helping me at present, it is making me uncomfortable

One of the big consulting firms writes “winning big by thinking big” and is suggesting larger companies will turn out to be among the biggest beneficiaries of initial big data implementations. Why?

In their words, “although big data projects still pose challenges, larger companies appear to bring more to the table.” I’m not sold on this. I feel the usurper has the edge over the incumbent. New models are like new species, they are faster at adapting to the changing landscape

Maybe we all have to be on edge, it makes us sit up and focus as others go jumping over the cliff screaming “disruptive whoopee” for our lemming moments. Are we all jostling for the leap, caught up in the moment, feeling great about the launch into the unknown?

Disruption and change is all about market transitions

I was listening to one of the World Economic Forum’s debates around “digital in context,” it confirmed much. The discussion led off with “watch for market transitions”, “don’t be slow to adopt” and “if you don’t reinvent, you will fail.”

The underlying message was that data has a real currency to all our organizations. They were suggesting that 40% of our current enterprises will be gone in 10 years and with the digital revolution, there will be a completely different landscape of winners and losers. There will be no hiding place with connected technology.

So we will increasingly see technology killing off jobs, causing dis-location, forcing many into life-changing choices. We are seeing increasing conflicting and fragmenting positions that are causing growing uncertainty.

The “cost to serve” is continuing to be driven down, and data is driving this. Add dislocation and deconstruction to disruption, destruction and digital.

We all need to keep moving
We are all being warned to “keep moving”. I often feel we have become like our forefathers, a nomadic tribe that is both physically being forced to move, to hunt for the jobs that allow us to live and to keep applying knowledge found through the internet to survive and thrive.

So it does seem we are in the “disruptive era” but I prefer to think this is more a ‘transformation’ period, often uncomfortable since much of its boundaries and borders are not clear.

It is fluid and we need to adapt to this flow until the disruptive events subside into something we have learnt to accommodate and manage. It is transforming much of what we know, our technology and all that comes with it.

Yet, we need to equip ourselves to be empowered in this transition, we need to keep constantly engaged and attempt to figure out what’s next or at least go with the flow. We need to keep our focus on outcomes and not get caught up in the inputs or the process.

The return of the hunter-gatherers.
Hunting and gathering have suddenly returned as an increasingly important part of our lives, it is changing us back. Nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes follow the animals they hunt; we need to follow the jobs and opportunities.

We are perhaps facing the same constant transition, so it is not a disease but a symptom of what is needed in our future lives, at least for the foreseeable future.

We need to embrace transition as the future way of living

My need, and I think yours as well, is to stay alert and be aware. In many of our jobs, there must be this chance to evolve, or we should move on. I don’t feel we can stand still long enough; we need to change it far more by taking a number of different risks. Keeping moving is part of our future.

I believe we do become far more empowered in any transition if we chose to actually make the change, instead of rejecting it on the premise that there is no need for movement. There is no hiding place it seems.

I just feel far better ‘in transition’ it is that feeling that I am still pushing forward, what I do is in my hands than the alternative, when that moment that I have stopped I am being threatened with disruption and destruction. Both are a little scary and will get exhausting.

Extinction is very threatening, oh just screw it, bring it all on… whoopee”.

The post Disruption, Destruction, Digital Our Way of Future Life? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The Forum for Growth and Innovation seeks to develop “breakthrough theories to help businesses become more successful innovators and create new, robust sources of growth”.  The webinar was all around surviving disruption but discussed also “looking beyond the horizons”.

The Theory of Disruptive Innovation

To offer a quote from the Forums own website (www.thefgi.net.):  “Disruptive innovation describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves ‘up market’, eventually displacing established competitors”.

“An innovation that is disruptive allows a whole new population of consumers access to a product or service that was historically only accessible to consumers with a lot of money or a lot of skill.

Characteristics of disruptive businesses, at least in their initial stages, can include: lower gross margins, smaller target markets, and simpler products and services that may not appear as attractive as existing solutions when compared against traditional performance metrics”.

The webinar raised in my mind many unanswered questions.
Central to the thinking for disruptive innovation is to address the jobs-to-be-done. Another nice piece that describes Clayton Christensen’s work in this area of JTBD is here. This seemingly simple idea has profound implications for re-framing industries.

Well in many of my unanswered questions there are some JTBD aspects clearly to this as well. Still that is another story for another day.

One question I had was this:

“Why do we have internal difficulties to self-disrupt?”
In most cases, organizations are not able to self-disrupt and this is largely covered by this veritable list of constraints. So I set about thinking about what these could be, here is my rather ‘stark’ list, can you think of any more?

• Organizations often are far too close to existing markets to recognize that they are actually shifting; they ignore or miss the signs in many ways.
• They get so fixed on their own perceptions they don’t see change coming – often until it is too late and have lost that intuitive, entrepreneurial touch within the mix.
• They have invested too much, they hang on, often reducing prices, pushing more volume into the markets, crank out even more “extras” to try and off set change.
• Organizations are full of rigidities, rules, procedures, processes and personalities and often no one is prepared to put their hand up to challenge the present paradigm.
• The reinforcing values are just plain tough to change, you need dynamite to shift these
• The people within organizations love the comfort of the nest they have built around themselves, who wants to bail out and expose themselves?
• The processes become overburdening, hard to change, far too complex to change without significant commitment and top management support
• Cultures are wonderful things but the dark side is they can stifle and constrain far more than promote and let free.
• Leadership is locked into the strategy, tied into compensation on delivery on the existing, not on the preferred, far more radical, risky alternatives
• Organizations, especially large ones are less than nimble, they fail to adapt and respond quickly enough – they prefer to double-down’ with more of the same but faster, leaner and more determined than ever, missing the real dangers occurring under their noses
• Today, we are putting more and more of our organizations into boxes, they are becoming highly structured and specialized to maximise effectiveness and efficiency.
• Markets are more global, faster, and fiercer to compete in, often organizations are reluctant to explore and experiment with new business models, or push into adjacencies for fear.
• Lastly it does not matter how hard many organizations try, they lack real intelligence in market and customer needs, hence why the jobs-to-be-done is one essential component.

While all these stay in place, or not recognized as inhibitors to your own disruption capabilities, it is not surprising it is in the end those up and coming usurpers, the nimble and unencumbered, that thrive and begin to disrupt. You simply struggle when you leave it to late- your organization needs to resolve many of the above issues before it is ever capable of responding.

Look more in than out – that is where your danger often lies
Sometimes we are spending all those significant efforts scanning the horizon for the next big disruptive ‘thing’ but in the end it is the internal difficulties that ensure it is ignored until it is too little, too late. Work on the warning signs daily.

“Perpetuating history”, as Clayton Christensen would certainly say, “simply opens the doors to disruptive innovation”. We need to really recognize ALL the symptoms on why we can’t internally self-disrupt.

Surviving disruption is something we all need to take the survival course on, so we all can recognize and deal with its introduction and constant threat to total disorder and multiple impact points upon our business.

Watch out, disruption is all around us.

The post Often we can’t self-disrupt as we feel constrained first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.