Disrupted!: How to Create the Future When the Old Rules are Broken

Copyright © 2020 Philippa Hardman and Chris Nichols

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To our past, present and future clients, with whom all of this is developed and through whom the world is changed.

Contents

Introduction

1 The Knife Edge

2 Do It!

3 The Inner Obstacles

4 The Organisational Obstacles

5 A Never-Ending Frontier

Acknowledgements

About the Authors

INTRODUCTION

We’ve spent twenty years as agents of disruption.

We’ve annoyed boards. We’ve been thrown out of organisations. We’ve fired clients.

But we’ve stuck at our work. We felt we had no choice. We saw that the multiple systems on which life depends were failing. So we’ve spent our time working with people, in many sectors, who saw the same thing and who became determined to rise to the creative challenge that this posed in their personal lives and in how they affected their organisations.

We’ve not become famous. No TED talks, no bestsellers. We have a niche, award-winning consulting practice doing work with executive teams, individual leaders and, through them, their organisations. Clients describe the approaches we use with them as provocative, challenging and ultimately very practical. We like to think we’ve made, and are still making, a real difference.

When we decided to put down in writing what we’ve learnt, and taught, over those years, we couldn’t find a publisher who wanted the book as we’d created it. They wanted two books. They wanted a different book. We wanted to write this book. It’s short, it’s straightforward and people need it right now. So, we’ve published it ourselves instead.

We dedicate this book to all the amazing people we have met and worked with in that time. And to everyone who picks it up, trying to address the multiple crises and systems challenges that we now face as a species.

Philippa Hardman & Chris Nichols

May 2020

1 THE KNIFE EDGE

We live in a time of crisis.

There are plenty of books on how to manage in such times. This is not one of those. It’s not about how to handle the first weeks of chaos; it’s about how to come out of the crisis with full focus on creating a new future, not simply replaying the game plan that led to the broken systems in the first place. It’s a book for real leaders in real organisations: the people who have to reboot and reinvent the systems that are broken. If they don’t do it, no-one else can.

Given that it’s obvious that everyone needs to become better at working with the unknown in a world of perpetual disruption, won’t this change ‘just happen’? Well, maybe, and maybe not. There’s a lot of imposed change just waiting to spring back into deep patterns (the world can’t afford that) and there’s a lot of inertia coiled and waiting to preserve those patterns. Inertia must not be allowed to win the day.

Organisations can get stuck – sooner than they think. They have structures, identities, processes: ways of being, ways of doing, ways of learning. These give rise to how the people within them see, hear and experience the world. They give rise to how people develop positions about all kinds of things, including strategies, campaigns, initiatives, stakeholder relationships, products, brands, systems, profit margins, organisational identity, culture, go-to markets and must-win battles.

Organisations become big, powerful and successful. They become known for being great at this or for having an unrivalled capacity for that. People want to join them. People in the organisation pour their energy into supporting and reinforcing these things. They fit in, get promoted, earn more money and acquire fancy titles.

All of this can work brilliantly, right up to the moment when the world becomes critically different to the world as it was. At this point, which occurs before anyone thinks there is any kind of crisis, the organisation needs to see those changes and respond. There is a moment – we call it a ‘knife edge’ – where all the great components of past success become threats to future flourishing. They start to entice the leader, the team, the whole organisation into not seeing, into not changing.

This book tells you how to stop this happening. It is full of practical ways to see more clearly, to free up stuck thinking and action, and to allow more flourishing to develop, so that your organisation learns to swim in the current of change. The alternative is decline, often slow to start with, but, also often, dramatic at the end.

The crowded horizon

Change is everywhere. Most of you will have a strong sense that there are a lot of powerful and important shifts going on in the world: ones that are filled with threats, but also opportunities. This is the stuff of the ‘horizon scanning’ that business planners and strategy gurus want us all to focus on.

They’re right. It’s worth taking a look at just some of the major changes that are (or should be) on the agenda of every organisation. The current and all-pervading virus pandemic is the most visible of these factors right now (and every organisation and every government is working out what to do as a result). But coronavirus is just the latest manifestation of failure