Disruption

In this episode, we explore the idea of disruption, its uses, and whether moving fast and breaking things is the best way to do business.

Transcript

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Hey, they're beautiful people. Welcome to NOVL Takes, the podcast where we lift the veil on business as usual, join us for our novel takes on business culture and the art of getting things done. I'm partner and principal Rachel Gans-Boriskin. And I'm founder and principle, Sarah Patrick. It's time for a new NOVL take. So Sarah, I wanna start with a joke. Oh, Lord. Knock. Knock. Who's there? Interrupting cow. Interrupting MOOOO. Oh my God, Rachel. This week, No. we're talking about disruption and not just in my excellent joke telling. In the 2010s Move Fast Break things became a popular reference point for disruption. As the release of Jonathan Chaplin's book, by the same name revealed that Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies were using this as an internal motto, and in many ways as a business practice. And you know, the idea behind this motto, was that disruption was inherently good. Mm-hmm.. But today we're gonna delve Its benefits, its costs, and what happens when we aren't intentional about how and what we disrupt. I know when I think of disruption, Sarah, other than my moo joke, which I was so excited to use, other than that joke, it doesn't really fill me with joy. Disruption to me, I think of disrupting the peace, market disruption personally, disrupting my train of thought or you know, my child disrupting a quiet afternoon. These are not positive things to me. My personal feelings are mixed about disruption. Okay. I actually think disruption is really important, and can really move the conversation along in some important ways. However, I have a lot of reservations around disruption for its own sake and that kind of the energy, and, assumption around the kind of move, fast break things because, bound up in that, motto, in that idea is that somebody's gotta clean it up, right? So kind of moving fast, breaking things without assessing what the impact of your damage is I have a lot of reservation about.. I sense from that that you have often been the person who's cleaning up what has been disrupted. Well, as a project manager, you are often in roles where you are at least doing some of the assessment around the impact of decisions There's definitely some cleanup work, to be done for sure... Yeah. I think when disruption became a buzzword, you know, folks were really thinking about disruptive innovation., You know, you think the industrial revolution shakes up everything, the idea that innovation changes things. Actually I think a great example of this is the lightbulb.. Mm. a light bulb, is a technological innovation, they're ubiquitous. We don't think about light bulbs as innovation, right? But a light bulb is a technological advance on a candle, on a lantern, which uses oil or wax, right? But what do light bulbs do? Suddenly it's not as expensive to use a light bulb as it is to go through candles. The light is better. You can read longer. You can work longer. Light bulbs fundamentally change the human experience of night and day. It changes our relationship to time itself. Right. That. Is disruptive. It is disruptive, but I think it's important to make clear the difference between innovation and disruptive innovation. Right? Disruptive innovation often is, actually qualified by, identifying a new market segment or a low market segment. so an area of the market that has kind of yet been untapped or identified and by introducing something into the market, forces existing things up market, right? I think, an important question is, What is the function of disruption?. Why? Why does it become this buzzword? Like what's it doing? Why do we want it? Right. I think part of it is it forces change. It forces a change in the conversation. It forces changes in the market. and so you can, I think it depends on who you're having this conversation with. Like what is the, what is the function of disruption? Is it a good thing? I would say, you know, from a perspective of, things changing and that force of change , it is a good thing. It can be a good thing. but I think ultimately, it forces a change to the status quo. It doesn't necessarily always achieve a positive outcome. but it does require us to rethink some of these things that have become status quo. To your point about the light bulb, do we want to have to rely on wax? Do we want to be in the dark in the way that we are in the dark? Do we want to, have to rethink some of these, ways in which we, exist in the world. I wonder, you know, this idea of disrupting the status quo. it changes things. It changes business, but it, it could change who's in charge. and that can be, I think, a really powerful idea. This sort of revolutionary energy. And I think a lot of times disruption comes from younger people and they come, they see a new way to do things and they're like,"yes, let's break things"- partly cuz they didn't build it. I, I think it's harder to break things if you're the one who built it. You get sort of proprietary about it. and, and that's normal and that's human. But that's also how things get, calcified. Hmm. Right. But this next question of is society, disrupted? We can certainly see changes with technology that reorder how we do things, but I wonder, when we're thinking about inclusivity, mm-hmm when we're thinking of diversity in workplaces, do these disruptions disrupt who's in the room? Or is it just the same people, the same types of people shifting seats. Right. Like, you know, how much really gets upended. I think we talk a lot about democratizing technologies that break things. I guess I'm suspicious of, you know, what is being broken. Right. But I don't think that that's often what the goal is when one's talking about disruptive innovation. When one's talking about like, maybe just being disruptive or, maybe disruptive acts, then yes, that could be the point. I am not opposed to the idea of breaking something if it is not serving the people it's intended to serve. If what the goal is, is to break it and think about rebuilding it, right? If the thing is taking up space where we can't build anew then sure, let's deconstruct it and build it again. And I think that's where my tension with move fast break things, kind of comes into place. It's okay to break things. Not everything serves us anymore. Sometimes we outgrow these things that we have built. But breaking something for its own sake, breaking something without a plan, breaking something, we don't have a sense of who it's going to impact when we break it? I have a really hard time with that, because, you know, to your point, , you just don't know what other kind of harm you're going to do. And if while you're doing it, your goal is to move fast, to be in this constant state of, um, read this really interesting article, that called that Move Fast state locomotion. If you are in that kind of constant state of locomotion, is there an assessment element that comes with your action? Are you making decisions in alignment with your values, with any set of values? Are you thinking ethically? Are you taking other things into account? I think, what I hear you saying is, yes to break things, maybe not on the move fast. Right. Let's move trepidatious and break things -with intent. Let us think and then intentionally break things.. With the plan of building after.. There you go. That is my iteration on Move fast break things. Yeah it's that planning in advance. it's thinking through, When I have worked with young people and they have revolutionary spirit and they wanna burn it all down, you know, I'm aware as an older individual, I'm less inclined to that mindset. But I, I kind of say, okay, but I still live in the house you're planning to burn down, so I would like at least a plan of where I and my family will go after you have burned this. You know, do you have some kind of shelter plan camps. You know, something going on. Um, and that it's, it is far easier to break mm-hmm. than it is to build. It's also a different skillset. Right. The people who think about disruption are innovators. They can imagine new things. Yeah. And that's exciting. But they may not be the people who are best at implementing and developing systems. So that it's a balance, right? Having the people who are in the room who think of big, new, wild ideas, and then the other person saying, Okay, but how do we make that work? Right. And instead of treating the person who says, how do we make that work as somehow, you know, the enemy of change, thinking of them as a partner in change. Because in having to grapple with the complexity of, implementation, your ideas should be sharpened. Mm-hmm.. you can think of new ways and developed with it as well. Mm-hmm. and so collaboration in breaking and building. Right. and collaboration takes more time than just doing it on your own. Right. You have a great shorthand for the first half of this, the innovators, kind of element of this, the toothpaste experiment. I just love the, the kind of visual about that, and I hold that all the time. So, a friend of mine is a grade school teacher and second graders, and she puts them in groups and she gives them all tubes of toothpaste, like the actual tubes, not those, you know, squeezy things. and said, okay, everyone get the toothpaste out of the tube as fast as you can. And all the kids go and they, you know, they're squeezing it out as much as they can. They've got the flattened toothpaste. The team that you know, did it first raises their hand, they won. Awesome. Okay. Now, everybody put the toothpaste back in the tube.. Mm-hmm. And she uses this as an example to say words come outta your mouth really fast and you cannot take them back. Mm-hmm.. So you gotta think that through. There's just no way to get that toothpaste back in the tube. you know, as we think about the smartphone, the smartphone changed the way we interact with the world. Mm-hmm. and as much as there are people who are, you know, there's this, return to a flip phone. No. No. It's not gonna happen. Right. It's maybe for that person, but not. Right. Right. Like so much of the economy is built on mobile platforms now. Right. That you're not going to be able mm-hmm. to do that. I mean when you have to check in at the doctors using your phone, that ship has sailed. Right. Right? So thinking about once it's out there, what do we do? And it would be really, really good if we thought about it a little in advance. Right. That's I think a lot of the idea behind design thinking is. Let's prototype this. Let's try it out. Let's do these thought experiments. So that you know, no, you're not gonna know exactly what it is. They're always unintended consequences. Absolutely. But at least to be cognizant that there will be. Right. And And try and game it out in advance. Exactly. To your point about, design thinking, in our work we use not only the tools of design thinking, but we also try to stretch this question about unintended consequences a little bit further, right? We offer a black mirror workshop where we're trying to really game out the extent of the unintended consequences and use disruption not, for its own sake, but as a tool. What does it mean to be disruptive to this degree? To a degree that we can think through, Yeah, it makes me think of that. Black Mirror as a television show. I find it so unnerving. It's, worse than any horror film for me, because it feels like it's set, like eight months from now. Mm-hmm. or something. Here is this technology that everybody thought was great and then they're gonna explore how it messes things up and like this terrible inverted world. you know, through that black mirror. any new technology, any new innovation, our idea is, "okay, what's the Black Mirror episode that would be written about this?" Right. And then, let's not do that. Right. Let's Black Mirror-proof it, at least for that scenario. And I think when we do it, there's a playfulness absolutely to it. Because so often when we're excited about an idea, we kind of poo poo anyone who says, oh, well there might be a dark side. So, you know, you gamify it, right. You say, okay, let's use all that brilliant, creativity that got us to this idea of breaking it. Let's use that to figure out the worst case scenarios. Mm-hmm. Be as creative about that as we were about the design. Right. And that actually improves what we're thinking. And begin to design into either the rollout or the design of the product, possibly some fail safes against these worst case scenarios that we can envision. Because like you said, there's always going to be some unintended consequence. But there might be some things that we could have anticipated and we wanna begin to mitigate against some of those. Yeah. I always go back to collaboration as well. Right. and not just within a room, but outside. If you are going to fundamentally disrupt an industry, who are the partners who you might want to get involved to help with the fallout especially when when we automate more things. What do we do with the, the displaced workers? Right. How can we use their skills? That may be a whole other set of people to think about, but you might have more support generally when you put something out there, if you've started bringing in those thought leaders about how to address it. Um, A nd you haven't just sort of walked in and said, oh, oops, forgot about you. Right. You know, what we do has impact. Especially if your a model is intentionally designed to, kind of remove a segment of the workforce from the workforce. I think, you know, it's quite important, but at this point, ,revolutionary to be thinking about how you're going to then support that segment. And, and as we look at organizations that often start from a place of wanting to build something better. Be intentional, about that. What are the impacts of what you do on the environment? On communities? Where you start a business? Who you hire? Mm-hmm., all of that. It, it's, it's thinking in that way. one of, so my, my first masters, I got in a program called Media Ecology. Mm-hmm.. And the idea it comes out of the seventies and everything, you know, sort of ecological. but the idea was that when you change anything in an ecosystem, even the smallest thing, the entire ecosystem is affected. Yeah, absolutely. And so when we change something as basic as media, which they defined as anything from, you know, writing mm-hmm. to computers, then you have changed the entire environment. Right. And the change has been so rapid, what is that impact? We're still feeling all of those changes and so we need to explore that. Right. So for me, intellectually that's often a place I go. What are the ripple effects? Right. When we have mercury in the water and all the little fish eat it, that's okay, but when the tuna is eating all those little fish and then suddenly we can't eat canned tuna because we turn it into thermometers, you know, maybe we need to be thinking about this. Right. Right. And disruption is abrupt, seemingly aggressive, version of change, right? Mm-hmm. This is like, even though it often happens over time, it feels very abrupt to that ecosystem. So I think, you know, even more so in the case of disruption. Right. You know, maybe we also though think about evolution. Which one theory is that it's, you know, kind of constant and another says, no evolution. These jumps are jumps, right? and disruption are those jumps. And we're not going back. We can think about, how this jumps us to the next space and what do we bring with us? What do we leave behind? Right. Alright, so I think we've disrupted, your afternoon or morning, or evening enough. And, we're gonna pause here.. Before we go, if this conversation has piqued your interest and you want to hear more about what we have to say, stay tuned for other episodes, and if you're listening on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, please rate and review us. Give us some love. And if you're curious about what we do over at NOVL or think we could help you or your organization, check us out and send us an inquiry over@thinknovel.com. That's T H I N K N O V l.com. That's it for us. Shout out to everyone who helped us make this show. This is NOVL Takes.