The Dangerous Dilution of the Term Disruption

I recently read several articles based on surveys which highlight a growing concern with how organisations understand and respond to the risk of disruption.

The first survey was published by Innosight, a leading strategy and innovation consultancy which lists Professor Clayton M. Christensen as one of its advisors.

Christensen originally defined the modern business use of the term disruption in a 1995 article in the Harvard Business Review and his 1997 classic book The Innovators Dilemma.

The Innosight survey has the subtitle Are Business Leaders Caught in a Confidence Bubble? The survey is a fascinating read, but for the purpose of this article, the subtitle says it all.

The second study, undertaken by MIT’s Sloan Management Review and Deloitte Digital’s, is summarized in an MIT SMR article entitled Why Companies Don’t Respond to Digital Disruption.

Both studies look at a range of possible reasons as to why organisations may be overly confident in the face of disruption, and as a result, are not adequately preparing to respond to such risks.

However I believe that one of the key reasons that organisations are not taking the risk of disruption that seriously may lie in my observation that the term disruption has taken on a broader meaning in recent years.

Increasingly disruption is being used as a catch-all term that now encompasses a range of business situations which previously were described using separate terms such as business transformation or radical innovation.

The shift away from the original definition of the term disruption is further amplified by the increasing trend to add the term “digital” in front of it.

I therefore suspect that the questions being asked by the two surveys were designed with Christensen’s definition of disruption in mind, but a proportion of the respondents will have answered within the context of the more recent broader meaning of the term.

If this is indeed the case, then it may explain why the MIT SMR article described some of its survey results as “staggering” and why Innosight’s main finding was a “disconnect between confidence levels and specific perceptions of threats and competition”.

Christensen’s Dilemma

I’m not the first to observe the broadening use of the term disruption which leads to a dilution of its original meaning. Christensen himself raised a similar concern in a 2013 Harvard Business Review article entitled What Is Disruptive Innovation?

In his article, Christensen observed that “the theory’s core concepts have been widely misunderstood and its basic tenets frequently misapplied”.

He goes on to note that “too many people who speak of “disruption” have not read a serious book or article on the subject. Too frequently, they use the term loosely to invoke the concept of innovation in support of whatever it is they wish to do”.

Corporate Equivalent of Crying Wolf?

The challenge for those who stick with the original narrow definition of the term disruption is that they may increasingly find themselves surrounded by the corporate equivalent of people who they perceive as “crying wolf”.

If you are one of the people using the term more broadly, be aware that others may be using the original narrower definition of the term and may start to pay less attention to your opinions.

As with Aesop’s fable of the boy who cried wolf, the risk of misusing the term is that when a truly disruptive threat actually comes along, the organisation may ignore it and miss any narrow window of opportunity to respond in an effective way.

They may then learn the hard way what the original definition of the term was meant to warn them of.

Sharpening the tools and using new tools

So, what are the possible solutions to this problem? Has disruption become a meaningless management buzzword, or can its original usefulness be salvaged to help organisations navigate the challenging times ahead?

As with all useful tools which have become blunted through misuse, the answer is to either sharpen up your old tools or get new ones.

The term disruption can only be sharpened-up if we collectively pull people up when they use the term too broadly and educate them on its original meaning.

At the same time I believe that there is a wider need to educate people to a greater degree on the terms commonly used in the fields of strategic risk, innovation and transformation.

The links in this article are a good place to start, along with articles such as this one from Boston Consulting Group’s Henderson Institute which describes what terms such as digital transformation really mean and links to a number of other useful articles that they have published over the last few years.

As for new tools, I wrote an article recently where I introduced a diagram which I have developed which can help clarify the meaning of the various terms used when discussing strategic risk and innovation within the context of your own competitive market environment.