The Disruptors Mindset
Disruption is a force that is changing the corporate landscape at a pace thats hard to comprehend. Your clients face it, your firm faces it and the professional services sector faces it. Should you ignore it or embrace it?
If you choose to embrace it, where should you start? I want to make the case for starting with mindset. A mindset shift to move from a traditional mindset to The Disruptors Mindset.
The good news is that this is a learnable skill set and there will almost certainly be a number of people inside your organisation keen to embrace this type of thinking. The role of a forward thinking leadership team is to embrace and encourage more of this type of mindset.
What is disruption?
Fifty years ago, if a company made its way onto the Fortune 500 list, it would expect to stay there for 75 years. That’s now down to 15 years and continues to decline such is the pace of change.
There is much academic work in this space to explain this phenomenon: Clayton Christensen’s work on disruptive innovation explored the ways in which disruptors enter and overtake industries, and analyses why incumbent businesses allow it to happen.
Stories surround us. The story of Kodak being disrupted is now legendary. The Fintech sector have been eagerly eyeing up and ripping into every single revenue line item traditionally owned by the big banks. Monzo, Starling, Klarna and many more in a few short years have ridden rough shod over the establishment. No sector is immune. There is scant respect for traditional “industry boundaries” or “core competencies”: Apple, originally a computer manufacturer expanded way beyond its traditional market to dominates sectors including phones, music and watches.
History shows that falling into the “too busy to think about it”, “too busy to plan for it”, “too busy to act on it” is a dangerous place to be. When I speak to senior leaders, the most common threads I hear are a need to be more agile, more resilient and to undertake digital transformation. Speed and action are of the essence: Darwin revealed those who survive aren’t the strongest, but those who adapt the fastest. In Jeff Bezos words:
“Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week. Being wrong might hurt you a bit. Being slow will kill you”
My contention is there are two core elements to consider. The first is to become well versed in the strategies of disruption and the best bets to make.
And secondly and crucially what’s the mindset you need. The best strategy in the world will fail at the first hurdle if your firm isn’t prepared to embrace change. If your culture rejects change in favour of the status quo, beware.
There are three useful starting points:
1) The first is humility.
If there is any enduring lesson from all the firms who’ve been disrupted, it’s hubris. As in, “we’re at the best at what we do and it’s worked for us before and it will continue to work for us”. The mantra of disruption might well be that if you plan to be in the business you’re in now, in five years time, you won’t be in business. It can be a tough pill to swallow to accept that you’re not good enough yet for the future. And yet it’s a vital pill.
2) The second is around identity.
It’s the ability to be able to change and evolve your identity. It’s a skill that we all need to learn individually. It’s a skill we need to embrace collectively as a team. The rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence is already rendering swathes of occupations redundant. The skill is one of reinvention. Who do we need to be in order to serve our clients in the future?
3) The third is around big bold thinking.
The single best way to get disrupted to start from today and only focus on what 5% or 10% growth. The Disruptive Mindset starts in the future and imagines what 5x or 10x look like.
It’s understandable to want to put this type of radical thinking down: to swerve it and to focus on what you know best - what you do well today. It’s comforting and tempting to make the case that this could never happen to us/ in our sector. That would be unwise.
Who's thinking big and bold in your team?
Is it someone? Is it no-one? Who’s investing in cultivating a Disruptors Mindset who has a senior enough voice to make a difference? And how do you develop the culture transformation to achieve that shift across an entire organisation?
Kodak failed?
Apple continuously does it well.
Where are you?