‘Disruptive thinking’; it’s the name of our blog and something we’ve been talking and thinking about together for a few years. But why? And what’s the point? We’ve come to believe that to thrive as individuals and to tackle the global problems that still elude us, we need to think disruptively.
What is disruptive thinking?
The word ‘disruptive’ is often associated with destruction and breaking apart, and yet our idea of disruptive thinking is positive and constructive; ideas that challenge the status quo and reveal what’s really going on. Ideas that are born out of wrestling with how our world works and how we, as humans, work within it. It is thinking and ideas that break the normal pattern, challenging the usual ways things work, not for the sake of it, but to uncover insights that can create more vibrant communities, better societies, successful businesses and joyful lives. We’re inspired by the well-known quote from Albert Einstein: “You can’t expect to do the same thing again and again and expect different results” - we have to think differently, we have to think disruptively.
Why disruptive thinking?
The last few years have confirmed for many that we live in ‘interesting times’. We are seeing the scale and persistence of the challenges that the world is facing – they’re often challenges that are dynamic, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, and evolving (often at pace). These are global challenges, whether it is the environment and climate, generative AI, health, education or justice, and also local challenges in our own lives such as how to process living through a global pandemic, and how to thrive (rather than just survive) in the fullest sense.
Change is a widely discussed topic - the need for it in certain situations, the reluctance to embrace it in others, the difficulties of enacting it or living through it. Change (which can also be growth or development depending on the context), generally happens in one of two ways.
Black swans and longshore drift
When so-called black swan events strike, they shake the foundations, test what is built on those foundations and offer a glimpse of the ‘what if?’. It’s the equivalent of a serious natural disaster. As we adjust in the aftermath, we often find our way back to how things were. Yet in some situations, when we take the time to reflect, we can see that certain things have changed profoundly, and some of those changes become part of a ‘new normal’. The attitude to flexible working in many sectors since 2021 in the wake of a global pandemic is a case in point.
The other way things change is in the gradual, incremental and often imperceptible actions that over time amount to an evolution that is visible. This is the equivalent of longshore drift, the gradual movement of individual grains of sand, which over time amounts to small changes that compound one another until a critical threshold is reached that results in cliff failure and the loss of land in one location and the creation of beaches in another.
In both instances it is a disruption that leads to change. This is why Einstein’s old adage about insanity resonates strongly in many situations. If we really want to get to different outcomes, outcomes that make headway at the large and small scale, and tackle the challenges where solutions remain elusive, by definition we need to be disruptive. We have become convinced that we need more disruptive thinking to imagine different ways of ‘doing’ and ultimately to find different ways of ‘seeing’ those challenges and finding creative approaches that breakthrough to transformational solutions.
Disruptive thinking will not only help us find solutions to the big challenges the world is facing, but also give us new perspectives and ways of living so we can thrive as individuals and as part of our communities.
Disruptive blogging
By writing our blog, our hope is to share our observations and perspectives on disruptive thinking. We’re not claiming to be sharing a completely new approach or even new ideas. Rather our hope is that from observing our current situations, and asking questions of some of the stories that we tell in our society (cultural narratives), we can offer an alternative and sometimes disruptive view.
As we’re writing these blogs, we’re mindful of four things
Thinking that is disruptive today or that is disruptive in one context may not necessarily be disruptive in another. In that sense we believe that disruptive thinking can be timeless (offering insight that resonates in many different contexts) but is also time-bound and bound by culture (ie. it will find its outworking in specific times and places).
Having said that though, disruptive thinking should be universally disruptive in that time and place - it should challenge all positions on a spectrum, whether that is the political right, left or centrist positions. Disruptive thinking won’t lean predominantly one way or the other, it’s something completely different.
There is also something about disruptive thinking that can help us get under the skin of a topic and reveal the underlying principle that gets us to the root of an issue. How we tackle that issue will be context dependent, but creating the opportunity to reimagine is a key part of disruptive thinking.
And finally, we can think disruptively about pretty much anything, which is why the range of topics that we write about is so broad.
By exploring disruptive thinking in this way we hope that there is something here that offers food for thought for everyone. For more on this see our blog on some of the "elements of disruptive thinking"!
little BIG ideas
A little summary of this big idea using the 1000 most common words
There's a great word: 'disruptive'. It means shaking things up, thinking in different ways. When people use this word they are often thinking of when things get broken up or thrown away. We like to use this word to talk about how we can look at the world and see different things, ask different types of questions, make new things, and fix problems in different ways to how we might have done it before.