Are You Ready for Big-Bang Disruption?

In their excellent Harvard Business Review article aptly titled “Big-Bang Disruption”, Paul Nunes and Larry Downes make the case that disruptive new entrants will radically transform more industries far faster than originally envisioned by Clay Christensen in his landmark treatise on this subject 18 years ago.
The authors attribute the accelerating pace and scope of disruption to:

• The increasing role of IP rather than physical product attributes in creating disruptive product performance gains
• The substantial decline in IP-driven development costs as inventors exploit  off-the-shelf SaaS technologies and cheap server and storage capacity to create new product mashups at breakneck speed.

Take Twitter for example, born out of a daylong brainstorming session, launched in alpha form within days and released to the public within four months, this information sharing platform has disrupted newspapers and national governments in ways which could not have been easily foreseen.  Or consider the plight of dedicated GPS navigation device makers Garmin and Tom Tom whose market has been obliterated by the explosive growth of smartphones equipped with Google’s free map app.

With respect to how the new generation of disruptors are likely to impact incumbent market leaders,  Nunes and Downes warn: “You can’t see big-bang disruption coming. You can’t stop it. You can’t overcome it. Old-style disruption posed the innovator’s dilemma. Big-bang disruption is the innovator’s disaster. And it will be keeping executives in every industry in a cold sweat for a long time to come.”

If you accept this premise (as I do), it leads inexorably to the question every company should be asking themselves: are we innovative enough to be the disruptor and not the disruptee in the next wave of transformational change in our industry?  While there are a number of diagnosticsdesigned to test whether companies have a culture conducive to promote innovation, there is one salient indicator that warrants particular attention: how does your company deal with “truth-tellers”?
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Nunes and Downes define truth tellers as “internal or external seers who can predict the future with insight and clarity. In every industry there are a handful of these visionaries, whose talents are based on equal parts genius and complete immersion in the industry’s inner workings.  They may be employees far below the ranks of senior management, working on the front lines of competition and change. They may not be your employees at all. Longtime customers, venture capitalists, industry analysts, and science fiction writers may all be truth tellers.”

Truth tellers play a particularly important role in presaging the need and opportunity to develop new business models which disrupt incumbent business positions, long before the need to change becomes obvious (by which time it’s often too late to stop the destruction of your business by a disruptive newcomer).
By their nature, truth-tellers make most business leaders uncomfortable:

• Truth tellers are often eccentric, and their conviction can easily be mistaken for arrogance and stubbornness
• They generally have no respect for current achievements which are a source of considerable pride to top management (e.g. “we are the global market share leader!”, “our sales topped $5 billion last year!”)
• They don’t think/talk/act like “team players” in top management
• They argue with passion and conviction, but lack the thick binders of market research that management has come to expect
• They convey a message that is threatening to the organization. Believing it — even a little bit — requires a willingness to contemplate highly disruptive, unpopular and risky changes to the established order
• Truth-tellers’ view of the world creates FUD on steroids!

Most corporate executives thrive on the ability to manage their business in an orderly fashion — to harness the firm’s resources to deliver predictable, reliable and steady earnings growth.  Unfortunately, there is nothing orderly or predictable about big-bang disruption, and companies who ignore early signals foretold by truth-tellers do so at their peril.Thus how executives deal with truth-tellers is actually a good indicator of whether a company is likely to exploit opportunities as a disruptor, or be flattened as the disruptee.

Sadly, over a long career in senior management consulting, I’ve witnessed far too many cases where executives not only fail to continuously seek the counsel of truth-tellers, but rather willfully prevent such voices from being heard and evaluated within the organization.

What are some of the mechanisms executives use to stifle truth teller input?:

1. Ignore/dismiss/deny access
   The first line of defense is against dissonant ideas is simply to ignore, dismiss or deny access of truth tellers to the executive suite.  In too many cases, executives simply  deny any forum for truth tellers to air their views.  They are not invited to executive conclaves, their emails are ignored and if a truth teller does manage to lob in a point of view on disruptive threats (or opportunities), their views are publicly rebuked as quackery.  The upshot of course is truth tellers will find other forums more receptive to their views, including jumping ship to other companies who may emerge as industry disruptors
2. Grin-f*#k truth tellers
   When the voices of truth tellers become too loud to ignore, some executives move to a second line of defense.  With apologies to PC readers, grin-f*#king is a common and insidious technique to discount the input of truth tellers, while creating the illusion of responsiveness.  GF’ing is defined as  “when someone in business smiles and shakes your hand assuring you that they have heard and will act upon your ideas or concerns when in truth you have already been ignored and dismissed.”  The first time a truth teller gets GF’d, he or she may fall for the ruse of feigned responsiveness.  But actions speak louder than words, and persistent truth tellers soon learn to recognize when they’re being GF’d rather than taken seriously.
3. Create task forces to reinforce status quo behaviors
   The final line of defense of the established order in the face of an inherently uncontrolled disruptive threat is to establish a task forces stocked with “team players” who can be counted on to limit the strategic assessment to safe choices within the organization’s comfort zone.  Such task force initiatives are often publicized with great fanfare as a testament to a company’s commitment to cutting edge innovation.  But in reality, these companies are confusing activity for progress, and by design, task force initiatives wind up reinforcing the status quo.

If you see some or all of these behaviors in your organization, be afraid; be very afraid.  Big bang disruption is likely to be lurking sooner than you think and will take your company by self-imposed surprise.