Embracing the art of disruption

We are living through a period of dynamic change, where disruptive forces are intersecting, colliding, repelling and coming together in a heady melting pot. The speed of this change is unparalleled, accelerating and becoming ever more disruptive. Tectonic shifts that once took 100 years now routinely take less than 20. What took the telephone nearly 80 years to reach 50% of US households took the smartphone about six. Consider, too, some of today's online giants and where they were 20 to 25 years ago. Businesses such as Airbnb, Uber, eBay and even Amazon.

To put this into perspective, Cisco's 2020 Global Networking Report estimated that mobile traffic would increase by 42% by 2022 and that virtual and augmented reality traffic would expand twelvefold. Look at electric vehicles: Tesla is now valued at $1 trillion, while one of its competitors, Rivian (who, you may ask?), has already reached a valuation high of $100 billion. Such is the speed of change that what we see as today's marvels are fast becoming the new normal. From AI, surgical robots and driverless cars to drone swarms, the changes unfolding before us are breathtaking, and the speed of disruption is only accelerating.

We all have the benefit of hindsight, but deciphering the future is far more difficult, and positioning organisations for it is more complex still. We can use the past, along with the behaviours, patterns and trends we see around us today, to signal what the future could look like. Some of these signals are as clear as day; others are more nuanced and subtle, but they are there. One thing is certain: thinking about strategic positioning in terms of the next few years, and in continuous improvement terms, will no longer cut it. Organisations are courting disaster if they do not know what their disruptive future will look like in 10 to 20 years, and have not worked backwards to optimise the here and now while positioning themselves for that future in a managed, evolutionary way. Management teams need to consider the real possibility that new competitors, in potentially unrelated fields and with significantly fewer resources, have already done the work to generate that foresight using the wealth of data available, and set out on that disruptive journey yesterday.

If we learn nothing else from Darwin's theory of evolution, or from the extensive corporate graveyard littered with organisations both small and behemoth, it is this: failing to evolve at the right pace or in the right direction means many enterprises will go the way of the dinosaurs, and a good deal quicker than ever expected. Even the disruptors of today are finding themselves disrupted by new upstarts.

We routinely track, using our APTIM-Solutions proprietary intelligence platform, more than 40 disruptive forces broadly classified into six dimensions: technological, demographic, environmental, economic, political and social. All play a seismic role in an unfolding future. These primary forces can act independently, compete, converge and sometimes collide at different rates, intensities and degrees of importance, depending on the contextual complexity and adjacencies in which an organisation operates. Organisations need to understand the behaviour of these forces and develop them into a considered, plausible and holistic view of the future world. They can then prioritise the challenges that must be overcome, and map the inputs, timings and architecture required to win the right to compete for a share of this future opportunity, while optimising the here and now.

To win the right to compete in a sustainable manner, organisations will have to think not only in terms of the environment but more holistically, across all six strategic dimensions mentioned earlier, including the ethics of the decisions being made. This is all the more pressing as technologies benefit from significant improvements in mobile connectivity and speed, quantum computing and AI. At the same time, two billion people are being added to the world's population, and to the ranks of the middle class, alongside an increasingly clear picture of the damage sustained to the environment. All of this will drive rising levels of social activism, capital shifts, and political and regulatory intent.

Our research clearly shows that today's organisations, public or private, will not be able to hide behind the whirlwind of short-term challenges and financial objectives for very long. The growing pressure exerted by public activism, by trustees responsible for safeguarding and growing pension pots, by governments and regulators, and ultimately by investors and fund managers themselves, means the impact of the medium- and long-term disruptive future cannot be ignored.

Embracing the art of disruption is a critical function and core competence that needs to be embedded in any organisation's DNA. The goal is to bring about revolution in an evolutionary way (though this transition may not be as long as one might think or hope), through three phases of growth: optimising the here and now, transitioning through the medium term, and bridging to the disruptive future. By managing those inputs deliberately, organisations win the right to compete for a share of that future.