In the last 50 years we have witnessed transformational change, and technological developments have been at the heart of that. The pace of change has gone up a gear in the last few months, particularly in terms of the scale and capabilities of the developments in AI that have hit the news.
Einstein famously said, “We can’t solve our problems with the same thinking that created them.’ We’ve come to believe that to thrive as individuals and to tackle the global problems that still elude us, we need to think differently and disruptively.
We’ve shared our view of disruptive thinking and now we explore some of the elements that continue to shape our thinking, help us to get under the skin of our cultural narratives, and begin to think disruptively.
Cultural narratives in the post-Industrial Revolution
Cultural narratives are the commonly agreed upon ideas and norms that dominate how we think about the world. They’re not necessarily good or bad, they just are - they’re the pot we’re all boiling in. While fundamentally we can’t fully escape our cultural context, disruptive thinking can help us to see past the more superficial, culturally accepted narratives to get at why we do what we do or think what we think. Depending on the topic, disruptive thinking may lead us to challenge that cultural narrative and offer alternative ideas, ways to live, or questions to ask.

As we take stock from our particular location of the UK, it could be said that we’re living in a time that is characterised by the post industrial revolution, which shapes much (though not all) of our cultural narratives. There is a prevailing rational and economic mindset that has its roots in the 19th and 20th century approaches to the economy. This has a huge impact on the way that we tend to view productivity and what we value. For example, in education, there is a strong focus on promoting the uptake of STEM subjects. There are many great reasons for this, but one driving factor is because STEM subjects are useful for training the next generation of adults who can contribute to society and be productive in a way that will drive our economies. However, this focus has created a hierarchy and we’re living in a time now where the value of the arts and humanities is being eroded in part because they don’t fit the STEM model of what is productive and therefore what is valuable. As a result, we’re neglecting the value (often value in broader terms) that disciplines beyond STEM can bring, and how intrinsic a role they play in a flourishing society. Ken Robinson articulates this powerfully and his message is as salient today as it was then, and perhaps is even more pressing now than ever before.
What if we moved beyond a narrow view of productivity that translates into solely economic value? What if we took a more holistic view of what contributes to a flourishing community and avoided a simplistic hierarchy of value that pits one mode of productivity and value over another? Even more than that, what if we could get to a point where we’re not trying to strike a good balance between the two? What if we could find a way to have both?
‘It’s not an education problem!’
A big influence for both of us has been the concepts and frameworks of behavioural economics as set out by Daniel Kahneman. In the science or STEM world, a long standing challenge has been how to get great science and engineering to make a tangible meaningful difference in the real world. In the corporate world of communications and employee engagement where there is often a focus on awareness raising and changing behaviour, there is often a tendency to tell people ‘stuff’ and expect them to take action and change. We’re seeing more and more that the ways of doing things that are based on models that are predicated on people acting economically and rationally are inherently flawed.
People are diverse extraordinary individuals, as well as corporate communities, and people introduce uncertainty, ambiguity and nuance. If we want science that makes a difference in the world, or people to feel more engaged at work, we need to find a way to engage with people that is appropriate to their context and mindful that they are not rational economic beings. We need to have approaches that can accommodate real people, recognising that we are all more than the sum of our parts, and global challenges are no different. People often know what the ‘best’ thing to do is (such as eating a varied and balanced diet), but even though we may well agree with that in principle, people often don’t achieve that healthy diet. Often, it’s not an education problem - rather we’re complex individuals and groups of individuals, and we often don’t make economically rational decisions. (This is often a really good thing, but that’s for another blog!) This is not to say that this blog is about behavioural economics or that behavioural economics is synonymous with disruptive thinking. It’s simply to say that behavioural economics is regularly challenging cultural narratives and it’s influenced how we see disruptive thinking.
Disruptive thinking to thrive
The status quo is often the status quo for many plausible reasons, and it often stands the test of time for those very same reasons. But we are at risk of remaining static in dynamic evolving contexts if we go about tackling challenges in the same ways and within the same infrastructures that we’re used to. This is why we’re convinced that disruptive thinking is key to thriving and being part of a flourishing society. We’re not suggesting dismantling everything that currently exists for the sake of it. But we do think that to have the innovation and breakthroughs that we need in both the large scale and small scale challenges, we need to create opportunities to engage with and critique existing ways of seeing and doing, which often come from rational and economic models. When we do this we create the potential for reimagining what is possible.
So how can we break the insanity loop of doing the same things, taking the same approaches and using the same tools as we have always done and expecting to get different results? We need to be disruptive thinkers. We need to be people who are not only brave enough to imagine different ways of living that are enriching, enlivening and sustainable, but we also need to be people who are bold in stepping outside of the status quo and taking risks, and in so doing, create opportunities for ourselves and others to think creatively and disruptively. If we don’t, we risk missing out on the breakthroughs that are needed at the large scale, and missing out on the big life that is possible for each of us wherever we are that is enlivened and part of a thriving society.
little BIG ideas
A little summary of this big idea using the 1000 most common words
Trying the same thing again and again doesn’t always work when we are trying to fix things. Sometimes we need to do something different.