Disruptants
Peter Drucker used to say to me “I’m not a Consultant. I am am Insultant!” Only Drucker could get away with that line and get a laugh to boot.
After all these years, I’m finally starting to understand what he meant.
I’ve been lucky enough to be a consultant to hundreds of organizations in my 20 year career with Delphi. To this day what I find especial fascinating is that within the first 5-10 minutes of a being part of a client company meeting I can tell with 99.9% certainty what kind of culture and values exist in the company. It’s almost like running a patient through a CAT scanner to see what’s going on below the surface.
So why do I share this?
All the talk about innovation, creativity, and collaboration is worthless in companies where a tolerance for disruption is not also present. Unfortunately this is not something that you can create out of thin air, no matter what tools, methods, and budget you apply to the problem. Innovation will never be sustainable in companies that can’t bear disruption.
I simply have never seen a company that is consistently innovative and not also consistently impressive when dealing with disruption.
I saw this twice in the last two weeks working with two separate Fortune 50 Clients. Both are companies that by every measure are among the world’s most innovative. Yet, both brought me on board to help them disrupt their field of view with tools and methods for innovation and creative problem solving. In the process I had to step into the role of being the “disruptant” rather than the consultant. My objective was to help them see the opportunity rather than the threat of disruption.
So what have my experiences as a disruptant taught me?
Never rest on your experience. If you work out to stay healthy you’ve probably learned that the worst thing you can do, if you want to keep yourself fit, is to do the same set of exercises every time you work out. Your body becomes accustomed to them, your muscles are not challenged, and you get board. You need to challenge yourself in new ways in order to get ongoing benefit from the effort, your muscles, like your brain, need disruption ion order to stay fit. The same applies to how you innovate. People need to be challenged to look at the problem differently. It’s why so much innovation comes from outside the list of usual suspects. These outsiders do not have a set point of view on how to solve the problem.
Disruption is a team sport. We all want to believe that we are the smartest person in the room (it’s not just me is it?). Even the best team players are tempted to tackle the problem on their own when a good idea pops into their head. Great teams pull individuals out of the abyss and back to the table. You end up on the team because you realize you are much better as an individual because of it, not because you lose your individuality to the team. The team becomes your greatest safety net as uncertainty and disruption increases.
Leadership has to allow failure. The world is filled with uncertainty. Organizations provide one benefit above all others, a place to experiment without fear of failure. If leadership punishes failure that occurs in the process of doing the right things then it ultimately punishes people for doing the right things. Leadership has to make it clear that failing fast is tolerated as long as it provides lessons with which to tackle the next problem.
Simple stuff right? Right? So, why don’t we all follow these simple tenets? Because we don’t like disruption. It’s painful to learn new ways of solving new problems. Of course it is, otherwise incumbents would always come up with the best new ideas and products.
The bottom line is that if you want to be innovative then you need to learn how to embrace disruption, look at it as an opportunity, and accept it as an invitation to walk through the door to a new level of success.
Tags: disruption, innovation
