We Need To Break The Disruption Mindset

In the 1990s, newly minted Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen began studying why good companies fail. What he found was surprising: They weren’t failing because they lost their way, but because they were following time-honored principles taught at institutions like his own. They listened to customers, invested in R&D and improved their products.

As he researched further he realized that, under certain circumstances, a market becomes over-served, the basis of competition changes and firms become vulnerable to a new type of competitor. In his 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, he coined the term disruptive technology to describe what he saw.

It was an idea whose time had come. The book became a bestseller and Christensen a global business icon. Yet many began to see disruption as more than a special case, but a mantra, an end in itself rather than a means to an end and, at this point, things have gone horribly wrong. We need to abandon the disruption mindset and focus on what really matters.

The Cult of Disruption

In 1982, when Steve Jobs was trying to lure John Sculley from Pepsi to Apple, he asked him, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” The ploy worked and Sculley became the first CEO of a major conventional company to join a hot Silicon Valley startup.

In the decades that followed, Silicon Valley evolved into such a powerful engine for entrepreneurship that many now see it as a panacea. Corporate leaders try to inject “Silicon Valley DNA” into their cultures and policymakers point to venture-funded entrepreneurship as a nearly universal solution. Jeffrey Immelt, quite famously, set out to transform General Electric into a 124 year old startup, with disastrous results.

The Silicon Valley model, for all of its charms, was developed for a specific industry—and a specific set of technologies— at a particular time. And even in the best of circumstances, most tech startups fail. Clearly, that’s not a model that’s universally applicable, but corporate executives often like to see themselves as something akin to swashbuckling entrepreneurs, so the myth persists.

The truth is that the disruption mindset usually leads to transformation theater rather than genuine change. Leaders who set out to disrupt tend to rush the strategic process and cut corners, leading to troublesome and costly missteps. They also tend to attract a lot of early attention—and with it, early resistance—making meaningful progress even harder to achieve.

The Growing Epidemic Of Change Fatigue

Managers launching a new initiative often seek to start with a bang. They work to gain approval for a sizable budget as a sign of institutional commitment. They recruit high-profile executives, arrange a big “kick-off” meeting and look to move fast, gain scale and generate some quick wins. All of this is designed to create a sense of urgency and inevitability.

Yet, although this has long been a basic tenet of traditional change management methodologies there is no real evidence that this is a good idea. Even when famous advocates publish supposedly scholarly articles, their rationalizations tend to be a mix of anecdotes, leaps of faith and non-sequiturs.

Consider a 2014 report by PwC that revealed that 65% of respondents in corporations cited change fatigue, 44% of employees complained they don’t understand the change they’re being asked to make, and 38% say they don’t agree with it. A more recent study by Gartner in 2020 suggests that propensity for change fatigue doubled during the pandemic and a 2022 survey by Capterra found similar results.

The effect on mental health is substantial and there is significant evidence that anxiety impairs performance. Stress tends to disengage the parts of the brain related to cognitive and executive functions and engage the emotional parts of the brain. A recent study by the American Psychological Association found that 71% of American workers report feeling stressed-out at work and three in five say that it negatively impacts their performance.

Undermining Creativity

A key rationale underlying the disruption mindset is that it promotes creativity and innovation. Undermining the status quo, the logic goes, creates space for the new and different. Yet there is little evidence that this is an effective approach and much that suggests that a disruptive environment impairs creativity and innovation.

In Cultures of Growth, Stanford social psychologist Mary C. Murphy points out that disruption impedes the growth mindset that is so necessary for supporting an innovative culture. In particular, she references Amy Edmondson’s research about psychological safety, which indicates that “fear inhibits learning” and laboratory experiments that suggest that performance goals impede working memory.

Pixar founder Ed Catmull wrote in his memoir that “early on, all of our movies suck. And called the filmmaker’s initial ideas “ugly babies,” because they start out, “awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete.” The trick, he points out, is to nurture those early ideas so that they can go “from suck to not-suck.”

Not everyone can see what those ugly babies can grow into. “Originality is fragile,”  Catmull pointed out.  The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations.  The new needs friends.”  “Our job is to protect our babies from being judged too quickly.  Our job is to protect the new.”

It’s hard to see how that can be possible in a culture of disruption.

Creating Safety Around The Change Conversation

The dumbest thing anybody ever said about change is that you want to start by creating a sense of urgency. If the change is truly urgent then everyone already know it.  The reason why so many change leaders cling to this “burning platform” mentality is because it ennobles the change leader, not the change itself.

It’s been roughly 25 years since Clayton Christensen inaugurated the disruptive era and what he initially intended to describe as a special case has been implemented as if it were a general rule. Disruption is increasingly self-referential, used as both premise and conclusion, while the status quo is assumed to be broken and inadequate as an a priori principle.

The truth is that creating a sense of disruption doesn’t accelerate transformation—it undermines it. It impairs creativity, drains morale, fuels change fatigue, and triggers resistance. We need to abandon the disruption mindset, pursue fewer changes and make sure we bring people along and make sure that we see them through.

If you want to bring genuine change about you need to start by creating a sense of safety around the change conversation. You do that by approaching transformation with a sense of empathy, identifying shared values and building trust. Meaningful change can’t be mandated or forced, it can only be empowered.

Change that lasts is always built on common ground.

Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, an international keynote speaker, and bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change. His previous effort, Mapping Innovation, was selected as one of the best business books of 2017. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.

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