This is Sunday morning and Europe’s at war. Through words that is. Some in celebration. Some in despair. The knock on effect gathers strength as resignations of familiar faces continue.

What is already clear is that there seems to have been as many reasons as individuals who voted. My dad’s generation voted from a memory of what preceded the EU. My niece’s generation see a different world. They’ve been plugged into it for years. Had the vote been to opt in or out of a bloc called ‘global’, I’ve no doubt about their choice.

What of the demographic north of the Trent river who said no? Will they actually get less immigration and a better funded NHS? Will their job prospects improve?

Those who promoted that agenda are now suggesting a much more qualified sense of whether these benefits will be realised. Maybe it’s the 4th Industrial Revolution at fault not the EU for their future quality of life. If so, what’s going to happen when they discover they’ve been duped?

While the final tally of votes is clear, peoples’ motivations are increasingly opaque and much broader than a yes-no vote. Has anyone really won? It is doubtful that many will experience their choice as delivering their expectations in full.

Brexit has disrupted the political process in the same way that business sectors are being disrupted.

In the brand-customer relationship, consumers have reached the status of individuals. The world of Amazon, Uber and the rest have set of an unstoppable trend towards personalisation at scale. IoT, messaging and personal AI driven assistance is taking that even further into real time, instant support.

Citizens, on the other hand, remain as tribes. They are just allowed to say yes or no via a referendum. Politicians are still judged by their loyalty to a political leadership than for their individual insight.

This is why politics is broken. We approached Brexit as individuals. We are still reacting as individuals. Yet the script demanded we took the result as citizens. However when it is personal, majority rule is a tough discipline. There never was a party whip that could influence a whole nation.

So unleashing individual opinion in the way Brexit has done cannot be contained within the binary outcome of a yes/no vote that the losing side is meant to abide by. This form of democracy is clearly a source of division and value destruction when used to poll us as people who now expect individual attention to our needs.

In the way that businesses are learning to hear the needs of individual customers and develop new operating models that are built around scalable individual needs, politics needs to catch up now that Brexit has disrupted the status quo.

It starts with the ‘outside-in’ agenda. Understanding what that means. Right now, the political elite who head the EU do themselves no favours by openly expressing surprise that European citizens have been so slow to understand the self-evident benefits of their ‘European project’. The sheer conceit of their viewpoint is something that business leaders have largely recovered from.

What next?

For once a new source of learning about living together as 21st century societies has begun here in Europe. The immanent US elections will then allow the consumer/citizen in that part of the world to play catch up on this new form of disruption. Good luck.