Let’s Stop Arguing About Whether Disruption Is Good or Bad

Greg Satell
May 21, 2015
Harvard Business Review
The idea of disruption excites some people and terrifies others. Consider the recent case of The New Republic, in which a new, disruptive CEO came in and vowed to “break shit.” The company’s top journalists balked, the brand was sullied, and the business still struggles. And all that for what?
That was the essence of Jill Lepore’s essay last year in The New Yorker about the “disruption machine,” in which she argued that, “disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror” and referred to startups as “a pack of ravenous hyenas” intent on blowing things up.
Most people over thirty have probably felt something akin to what Lepore described. Yet as I argued in my reply to Lepore, she presents a false choice between blind obedience to disruption and blind obedience to continuity. Clearly, neither is a winning strategy. In truth, successful disruption does not merely destroy, but creates a shift in mental models.
The primary target of Lepore’s attack was Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen, whose groundbreaking book, The Innovator’s Dilemma coined the term disruptive technology (later transformed into disruptive innovation). In her telling, he is the business equivalent of Mad Max, advocating for the destruction of the corporate order or, as she puts it, “disrupt, and you will be saved.”
You can see why Lepore is concerned. A “pack of ravenous hyenas” wildly intent on “breaking shit” certainly does sound menacing. Especially one empowered by a staid Harvard professor. Visions of the 60’s counterculture abound.
However, Lepore does Christensen’s work a tremendous disservice. A more thorough reading would reveal that he wasn’t, in fact, advocating for the destruction of the corporate order, but trying to save it. His research showed that once-successful firms often failed not because they lacked competence or conscientiousness, but because they were operating according to a defective model.
Since ancient times, from Aristotle to Ptolemy, leading all the way up to the present day, we have built working models to explain how the world works and we act on those models to solve problems.
Yet as Thomas Kuhn points out in his classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, we inevitably find that even the most successful models are incomplete. When an anomaly first appears it is usually treated as a “special case” and we worked around. However, at some point, we realize that the old theory is fundamentally flawed and that we need to shift paradigms.
Unlike Lepore’s disruptive “hyenas,” who revel in the destruction of the existing order, Kuhn noted that successful new models often include old ones. To illustrate the point, he offers the example of Einstein and Newton:
Relativistic dynamics cannot have shown Newtonian dynamics to be wrong, for Newtonian dynamics is still used by most engineers and, in selected applications, a great many physicists. Furthermore, the propriety of this use of the older theory can be proved from the very theory that has, in other applications, replaced it.
In other words, we use Newton’s model to create things like buildings and bridges and Einstein’s to create smartphones and GPS devices. Nothing has been subtracted, only added.
Following in the Kuhnian mold, Christensen points out in The Innovator’s Dilemma that there comes a time in which the practices derived from established mental models fall short. More specifically, he argued that when new competitors arose that targeted less profitable customers with a new business model, standard business practices—like those taught at his school—would fail to meet their challenge.
So Christensen’s work was in no way an attack, but in fact an acknowledgement of the shortcomings of his own profession. In essence, his point was that businesses that fail are often not the feckless bumblers they’re made out to be. Rather that by diligently following the precepts of incomplete models taught in business schools, they fall prey to assumptions that do not apply.
While Christensen’s ideas are noteworthy and important, they — like all models — are also incomplete and that, I think, is the source of Lepore’s confusion. While Christensen’s book focused on a specific type of business case, it also pointed to a much larger phenomenon that, when he first wrote it, was still in a nascent state.
Today, as Moisés Naím points out in his book, the End of Power, we see a great many disruptions today in politics, religion, and military affairs. At first glance these may have nothing to do with disruptive business models, but if we look closer we find that many of the same forces are at work: small groups, linked together by new technologies, and united by a common purpose can challenge even the most powerful institutions.
In the past, bureaucracies played a crucial coordinating role. It was through their vast control of assets that we were able to mobilize resources on a massive scale. Large institutions dominated because they could do what others could not. Yet now it is not control of resources that is important, but access to them. Digital technology enables relatively small actors to synchronize their actions through networks. Power, as Naím puts it, has become easier to get, but harder to use or keep. This is why we see disruption happening with increasing frequency, all around us.
This shift itself is apolitical, amoral. That’s why there can be both disruptors that set out to destroy, and disruptors that aim to create. The former are ego driven, seeking to replace the powers that be with a different version more to their liking. The latter are inclusive, working to create an alternative that outperforms the pre-existing model.
It’s not always easy to tell these two types apart. When an executive urges his team to “break shit” or “move fast and break things” he sounds more destructive than disruptive. So the question is not whether disruption itself is good or bad, but disruption in the service of what?
And that’s the difference between Lepore’s hyenas and the likes of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. Successful disruptors might break old models, but they build better ones that benefit us all, which is why we embrace, rather than fear them.