Reframing Disruption as Creative Destruction

In our post-digital era, the disruptive company rules. You know that instinctively, I don’t need to toss out names like Apple, Uber, Tesla, or Netflix to make that case.

What I find fascinating is not just how these giants have reinvented industries, but also how they’ve also redefined a formerly negative word: disruption. 

Look it up in the dictionary, and the first definition is “troublemaking.” 

The second is “innovative or groundbreaking.”

This delivers an inherent contradiction that I see clients wrestling with all the time. Sure, they come to my agency, Digital Surgeons, saying that they’re willing to make a change. They see the competition pulling ahead, they’re sick of seeing their numbers gummed up by the same old challenges, and they’re open to a new, brighter future for their brand.

At the same time, they’re terrified of smashing the status quo, particularly if they’ve enjoyed success with the same products and services over time. What if the new direction fails? Won’t a new course derail us from everything that makes us great?

The real troublemaker is that fixed mindset that tells you that what you’ve already achieved is all you’ve got. From that vantage point, change feels impossible.

So all that’s needed to inject your business with real growth opportunities is a reframing of disruption.

A smart disruptive framework

There’s a third definition of disruption: change.

And if there’s one thing we know about change, it’s this: Change is the Only Constant

Most of the time, change isn’t abrupt. It takes time and, when done right, it’s a joyous process of creative destruction. In every realm of life, this happens in stages. For example, our bodies tell the story of creative destruction every time we breathe. We take in oxygen, our bodies convert it to energy (creation), and we exhale (destruction). And repeat, from the day we’re born until we take our last breath.

Similarly, companies that thrive over time are in the habit of taking in new concepts, metabolizing them, and creating something new that better meets the needs of their customers. Like humans beings, innovation is the oxygen that keeps brands and businesses alive.

The key is not to get too focused on or stuck at any one stage. To me, the core of McKinsey’s “Three Horizons” model, widely used over the last two decades by business leaders to drive growth, still has a key relevance in our post-digital age:

Horizon 1: Ideas provide ongoing incremental innovation to a company’s existing offerings. 

Horizon 2: Ideas extend a company’s reach and existing capabilities and business model to an expanded set of markets and customers.

Horizon 3: The company creates fresh capabilities and new business by responding to and capitalizing on disruptive opportunities.

Back in the day, a business would assign a relative delivery time to each horizon, which minimally spanned three months and could go as long as three or more years. The beauty of today’s technology is that it can rapidly bring all three horizons’ objectives simultaneously into near reach. So the timeline aspect of the Three Horizons model doesn’t hold up — the speed at which markets move and mature, and consumer expectations evolve, mean for businesses, you snooze, you lose.

What does hold up, and what I love about this model is that it allows leadership to understand and map what it looks like to be able to execute with excellence today while simultaneously imagining and creating future-facing innovations.

When you reframe disruption as creative destruction, you can see it’s not an either-or proposition (disrupt or die!); it’s an “and” proposition. And suddenly, breaking new ground doesn’t seem like trouble at all. It just becomes what you do.

How do you or your company define disruption? Share your take with me in the comments.