🔗 Nice to see ‘Disrupt’ ‘growing’

… not by size - it has been a big show for a long time - but in terms of thinking.

To my mind the revolution that drives tech startups is disruption - yet too often the result is destruction. Sometimes directly, sometimes an unintended consequence. (I Need to Write That Post.)

Beyond that, the historical challenge is that disruption and destruction seem to get conflated - even at times used interchangeably. They are not the same thing.

In short ..

Disruption can be positive or negative, acting as a catalyst for change depending on how we view it.

Destruction is the act of causing irreparable damage or making something cease to exist.

But there’s more … that other word … ‘innovation’.

Innovation is too often associated with ‘disruption’ - but that is not actually the case, though ‘disruptive innovation’ does tend to grab the headlines for radically altering industries or ways of thinking, but not all progress has to come from upheaval.

In many cases, steady, incremental improvements can lead to significant advancements without the need to completely overhaul existing systems. Building on what already works, refining processes, or enhancing current technologies can be just as powerful.

Both disruption and gradual innovation play important roles in driving progress—it’s about choosing the right approach for the context and the goals at hand.

Nobody explains this better than Geoff Moore (of Crossing The Chasm fame), who wrote Zone To Win … His framework speaks volumes.

.. and worthy of another ‘reminder’ post sometime, (A Second Post I Need to Write.) but not the point of this post, which is that this all came to mind as I was looking at the headline speakers for Disrupt this year.

Delighted to see Mary Bara headlining. To be clear, I am no gear head / auto follower - but it seems to this casual observer that she has done a much better job at navigating the shark invested waters of the global automobile industry than her major competitors. The nay sayers will argue ‘lack of innovation’. They are wrong. It’s just that her focus has been on the right side of Geoff’s matrix. Not to say that she hasn’t also been pushing on the bottom left, just not always with great success and that is where all the noise is.

/ #TwoCents