Blog Post

Welcome the disruptors – but don’t let them near the controls

consult leadership Nov 19, 2020
Photo by Carl Raw on Unsplash

Apparently one of Dominic Cummings favourite gestures on leaving a meeting was to pull the pin out of an imaginary grenade and throw it over his shoulder as he walked out of the door. 

You can mourn or rejoice at his going, but there are lessons to be learnt for leaders from the reign of Cummings.  The first is that disruptors are a good thing, without them change would be slow and very incremental.  Disruptors are the people who dare to think differently, to overturn the status quo.  Without people who said things such as: “I wonder if the earth really does to round the sun?” “Will we really fall of the edge if we just keep sailing?” “Maybe I should see if this odd green mould is good for anything?” and then setting out to investigate it, we might not have made the scientific progress that we have.

Disruptors often pay a high price for their curiosity.  Unlike cats they only have one life and many of them have been lost at sea, poisoned by their own experiments or burned at the stake by the less disruptive.  Unlike most of humanity they are willing to take extraordinary risks and to go to war with the establishment.  For any organisation they represent trouble.  They are often intolerant and hard to get on with, their ideas run counter to the received wisdom.  They are not team players and if they manage to make their way into a team there is a high probability that the team will spit them out.  That is a fatal error.  Disruptors are essential to any organisation, they bring fresh thinking, they look for new opportunities, for ideas that will transform a business.

Every business needs Disruptors.  At Defy Expectations we have a concept called “The Disruptive Bench”. We believe that you need to find the disruptors in your organisation and bring them together as a team.  It’s a team that is very hard to manage – it sometimes implodes but properly run it can transform an organisation. 

The mistake many organisations make is to confuse Disruptors with Leaders.  They are different skills.  The skill of leadership is to take the disruptive ideas, to integrate the good ones into the vision of the organisation and to deliver on the change.  Do not give this job to a Disruptor.  They will cause chaos and will generally leave in despair because no one understood them. The most difficult activity for any organisation is to create an environment where their ideas will flourish, they will get all the credit for their views but will not be able to destabilise the organisation.  Leaders need to learn to value Disruptors.  For that to happen Leaders must be able to take the ideas of Disruptors, genuinely assess them for their usefulness and then implement them.  Disruptors (if they are good) will always have far more ideas than any organisation can deal with.  Part of the Leader’s role is to keep explaining to the Disruptor how their ideas are being assessed and to manage any fall-out from those that are not. 

 If you can do this then you will be able to both keep your Disruptors, use their ideas but also over time develop an organisation that understands and welcomes managed disruption.