Disruptive innovation: What can Publishing learn from a tube strike?
The internet’s definition of disruptive innovation is:
But what does that actually mean? How does it work in practice? To understand it, let’s first dissect disruption in our own lives. What are its building blocks? What is its causality?
On 21st November 2013 Travel for London announced that a 24-hour weekend tube service would run on selected lines by 2015. Buried within this gleaming PR message, was the fact that 750 redundancies would be made. We can call this: cause.
On Tuesday 4th February 2014 the first of two 48-hour strikes by London Underground workers began at 9.30pm. We can call this: effect.
The Guardian’s headline on Wednesday the 5th of February was: Tube strike brings disruption to millions of London commuters.
In this context the journalist was using ‘disruption’ to refer to the change each of these millions of commuters had to make to their usually Monday to Friday commute. With the Tube service out of operation each commuter had to adapt the usual actions they make to get them from A to B.
This change of routine leads to a feeling of disruptive chaos for three reasons:
- The commuters’ autopilot cannot be relied on. Perhaps they have made this same journey for many years. With the usual modus operandi out of action, new challenges have to be faced. New decisions have to be made. This in turn exerts more energy than is usually required.
- The commuter is taken out of her usual comfort zone, which invokes a feeling of stress.
- The journey takes more time, because the disruption is also being felt by other commuters who are all trying for an alternative strategy to enable them to reach their destination.
So we can assume, from this example at least, that when disruption of any kind occurs it demands adaption and change to the usual methods and routines of the individuals the disruption is effecting. For these individuals it causes stress, it requires them to face new challenges and to formulate strategies of solution.
Disruption is also self-fueling. As more and more individual ‘disruptees’ are added to the commuter chaos they only disrupt each other more, adding to the overall disruption. Think traffic jams, bicycle crashes and crammed pedestrian walkways.
In the example of the tube strike, all the commuters still get to work in the end: it just takes them longer. They still achieve their goal, just in a different way.
For old media industries however, disruption is here to stay. For publishing, and many other industries, the causality of disruption was the growth of the global network.
This network has transformed not only the way we read but also the way we shop, communicate, date, learn, protest … The network enabled connected technologies too. New products like tablets, eReaders and Smartphones arrived on the market and reached a critical mass. We can call this: cause.
As a result publishers had to change their routines to create new products to serve these markets. They had to adapt their usual methods and actions to get from A to B. Only here A to B is not a commute, but the process of commissioning content and then selling it to a consumer at a profit. This meant new challenges were faced, new decisions had to be made, strategies had to be formulated.
Publishing was stressed. We can call this: effect.
Publishing is often blamed for being slow to react to technological change. The reality is radical reinvention for large cumbersome businesses involves complex mass-administration.
New workflows had to be established to deliver content in forms it had not been traditionally delivered in. This meant investments had to be signed off. New skills had to be acquired. Digital natives had to be captured. Then new agreements had to be put in place with authors and agents. Contracts had to be found; royalties had to be agreed; addendums had to be signed; products had to be created; supply chains had to be adapted; price points had to be formalised, bibliographic data had to be cleansed, internal cultures had to adapt; commercial trading agreements with large (unagreeable) online retailers had to be negotiated. This is the first wave of disruption.
Publishing did all of this. However disruption within the industry is not over. A second wave is now in play, which is the effect of the risks associated with the conglomeration of the industry and the entry of bright new things into the digital publishing space. Wave one was about adapting supply chain and product creation infrastructure. It was about skilling up the workforce and testing the digital book market. Wave Two is about constant reinvention. Stretching how we exploit and deliver intellectual property to remain competitive in a networked marketplace. It is about producing new product and finding new models. More on this in a moment.
For content creators of every kind, the global network has meant many wonderful things: Social media offers direct routes to readers. Online retailing means self publishing can get new work to scaleable audiences. Those ‘traditionally’ published can build and maintain strong interactive fan bases — or offer new interactive user experiences. Ideas, trends and collaborations can be reached, collected and established: twenty-four hours a day.
Of course, the network is also the catalyst for many challenges: de-valued consumer price expectations, increased risk of piracy, the centralisation of online retailing, a shrinking high street, low quality white noise eating up the attention span of otherwise engaged readers.
As we learned from the tube example: disruption is self-fueling. In other words, the greater the number of individuals involved, the greater the disruptive impact. As a result: a slower ability to adapt and change.
From this we can assume that the larger the company, the more challenging it is to drive change. Large companies have flabby technological and financial systems. They have engrained working cultures and complex hierarchical structures and those driving change are usually the decision makers at the top.
They also keep buying each other and conglomerating so they can achieve the same sort of aggressive clout as the giants like Amazon, Google and Apple. Becoming flabbier they may struggle to react to and serve evolving markets in the future. This is a big risk.
Another risk, is the agile newcomer. Michael Bhaskar, Digital Publishing Director at Profile books, has been keeping a Google Doc of digital publishing startups. He defines these are any startup covering writing, publishing, bookselling, blogging and agency work. So far he’s collected over 250.
This puts more emphasis on the need for big publishing houses even bigger consolidated operations to retain the reactive agility that these new movers have in abundance.
How can this be managed? Well, they could behave more like start-ups. The entire business function can’t of course, but separate divisions can be set up — free of the historic and systematic baggage of the existing business. Still part of the business but also by its side, with a remit to take risks, experiment and assess new opportunities for the business as a whole.
These side-divisions should focus on:
- Gaining experience of new technologies, markets and trends
- Researching new revenue models and structures
- The immediacy and transparency of ideas
- Using lean startup methodologies to bring ideas into being
This is essential if publishing companies want to ride this second wave of “disruption” and reimagine at least some parts of their business offering. Surely as they continue to swallow each other up it is freedom of thought, flexibility of business model and capitalisation on the individual intellect of each and every employee that will allow them to serve the demands of the wily ‘networked’ consumer.
I can hear the alarm bells ringing from the bottom line already. How can this be paid for? What revenues could an outfit like this deliver? Although the publishing industry is rather used to hedging its bets it is still a cautious investor in non-book projects. However technological and business development is about long tail goals. Allow these development hubs to fail. Failure is an important lesson. Experimentation and validation is the only way to produce transformative models, products and strategies. Once you’ve failed, learned and moved forward you already know more than your competitors. Then you deliver the game-changer. Then the bills can be paid.
Just like our stressed London Underground commuters, to face this second disruptive wave the publishing industry needs to:
- Change its methods and routines
- Face challenges head on and adapt
- Make decisions differently and thus formulate new strategies of solution
And of course at all times: remain calm.
*This blog was created from a talk given to City University London Publishing MA students on 11.02.2014*
