Evolution or Revolution 3

Let me start this post with some quotes from @adriandaub's book What Tech Calls Thinking.

Disruption has become a way to tell a story about the meaning of both discontinuity and continuity.

Daub p 119

One ought to be skeptical of unsubstantiated claims of something's being totally new and not following the hitherto established rules (of business, of politics, of common sense), just as one is skeptical of claims that something which really does feel and look unprecedented is simply a continuation of the status quo.

Daub pp 115-6

For example, Uber.

Uber claims to have revolutionized the experience of hailing a cab, but really that experience has stayed largely the same. What it has managed to get rid of were steady jobs, unions, and anyone other than Uber's making money on the whole enterprise.

Daub p 105

Clayton Christensen would agree. In an article restating his original definition of the term Disruptive Innovation, he put Uber into the category of what he calls Sustaining Innovation.

Uber’s financial and strategic achievements do not qualify the company as genuinely disruptive—although the company is almost always described that way.

HBR 2015

However, as I pointed out on Twitter earlier today, Christensen's use of the word disruptive has been widely diverted by big tech vendors and big consultancies in an attempt to glamorize their marketing to big corporates. If you put the name of any of the big consultancies into an Internet search engine together with the word disruption, you can find many examples of this. Here's one picked at random: Discover how you can seize the upside of disruption across your industry.

The same experiment can be tried with other jargon terms, such as paradigm shift. By the way, Daub notes that Alex Karp, one of the founders of Palantir, wrote his doctoral dissertation on jargon - speech that is used more for the feelings it engenders and transports in certain quarters than for its informational content (Daub p 85).

@jchyip thinks we should try to stick to Christensen's original definitions. But although I don't approve of vendors fudging perfectly good technical terms for their own marketing purposes, there is sometimes a limit to the extent to which we can insist that such terms still carry their original meaning.

And to my mind this is not just a dispute about the meaning of the word disruptive but a question of which discourse shall prevail. I have long argued that claims of continuity and novelty are not always mututally exclusive, since they may simply be alternative descriptions of the same thing for different audiences. The choice of description is then a question of framing rather than some objective truth. As Daub notes

The way the term is used today really implies that whatever continuity is being disrupted deserved to be disrupted.

Daub p 119

For more on this, see the earlier posts in this series: Evolution or Revolution (May 2006), Evolution or Revolution 2 (March 2010)

In a comment below the March 2010 post, @cecildjx asked my opinion on the (relative) significance of the Internet versus the iPhone. Here's what I answered.

My argument is that our feelings about technology are fundamentally and systematically distorted by glamour and proximity. Of course we are often fascinated by the most-recent, and we tend to take the less-recent for granted, but that is an unreliable basis for believing that the recent is (or will turn out to be) more significant from a larger historical perspective.

What I really find interesting (from a socio-historical perspective) is how quickly technologies can shift from fascinating to taken-for-granted. Since I started work, my working life have been transformed by a range of tools, including word processing, spreadsheets, mobile phones, fax machines, email and internet. Apart from a few developers working for Microsoft or Google, is anyone nowadays fascinated by word processors or spreadsheets? If we pay attention to the social changes brought about by the Internet, and ignore the social changes brought about by the word processor, then of course we will get a distorted view of the internet's importance. If we glamorize the iPhone while regarding older mobile telephones as uninteresting, we end up making a fetish of some specific design features of a particular product.

If we have a distorted sense of which innovations are truly disruptive or significant, we also have a distorted sense of technological change as a whole. There is a widespread belief that the pace of technological change is increasing, but this could be an illusion caused (again) by proximity. See my post on Rates of Evolution (September 2007), where I also note that some stakeholders have a vested interest in talking up the pace of technology change.

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Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor, and Rory McDonald, What Is Disruptive Innovation? (HBR Magazine, December 2015)

Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2020)

Thanks to @jchyip for kicking off the most recent discussion.

Bold, Restless Experimentation

In his latest speech, invoking the spirit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Michael Gove calls for bold, restless experimentation.

Although one of Gove's best known pronouncements was his statement during the Brexit campaign that people in this country have had enough of experts ..., Fraser Nelson suggests he never intended this to refer to all experts: he was interrupted before he could specify which experts he meant.

Many of those who share Gove's enthusiasm for disruptive innovation also share his ambivalence about expertise. Joe McKendrick quotes Valar Afshar of DisrupTV: If the problem is unsolved, it means there are no experts.

Joe also quotes Michael Sikorsky of Robots and Pencils, who links talent, speed of decision and judgement, and talks about pushing as much of the decision rights as possible right to the edge of the organization. Meanwhile, Michael Gove also talks about diversifying the talent pool - not only a diversity of views but also a diversity of skills.

In some quarters, expertise means centralized intelligence - for example, clever people in Head Office. The problems with this model were identified by Harold Wilensky in his 1967 book on Organizational Intelligence, and explored more rigorously by David Alberts and his colleagues in CCRP, especially under the Power To The Edge banner.

Expertise also implies authority and permission; so rebellion against expertise can also take the form of permissionless innovation. Adam Thierer talks about the tinkering and continuous exploration that takes place at multiple levels, while Bernard Stiegler talks about disinhibition - a relaxation of constraints leading to systematic risk-taking.
 

Elevating individual talent over collective expertise is a risky enterprise. Malcolm Gladwell calls this the Talent Myth, while Stiegler calls it Madness. For further discussion and links, see my post Explaining Enron.

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Michael Gove, The Privilege of Public Service (Ditchley Annual Lecture, 27 June 2020)

Joe McKendrick, Artificial Intelligence May Bring More Management-Free Organizations (Forbes, 8 June 2020)

Henry Mance, Britain has had enough of experts, says Gove (Financial Times, 3 June 2016)

Fraser Nelson, Don't ask the experts (Spectator, 14 January 2017)

Bernard Stiegler, The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism (Polity Press, 2019). Review by John Reader (Postdigital Science and Education, 2019).

Adam Thierer, Permissionless Innovation (Mercatus Center, 2014/2016)

Related posts: Demise of the Superstar (August 2004), Power to the Edge (December 2005), Explaining Enron (January 2010), Enemies of Intelligence (May 2010), The Ethics of Disruption (August 2019)

The Ethics of Disruption

In a recent commentary on #Brexit, Simon Jenkins notes that

"disruption theory is much in vogue in management schools, so long as someone else suffers".

Here is Bruno Latour making the same point.

"Don't be fooled for a second by those who preach the call of wide-open spaces, of  'risk-taking', those who abandon all protection and continue to point at the infinite horizon of modernization for all. Those good apostles take risks only if their own comfort is guaranteed. Instead of listening to what they are saying about what lies ahead, look instead at what lies behind them: you'll see the gleam of the carefully folded golden parachutes, of everything that ensures them against the random hazards of existence." (Down to Earth, p 11)

Anyone who advocates "moving fast and breaking things" is taking an ethical position: namely that anything fragile enough to break deserves to be broken. This position is similar to the economic view that companies and industries that can't compete should be allowed to fail.

This position may be based on a combination of specific perceptions and general observations. The specific perception is when something is weak or fragile, protecting and preserving it consumes effort and resources that could otherwise be devoted to other more worthwhile purposes, and makes other things less efficient and effective. The general observation is that when something is failing, efforts to protect and preserve it may merely delay the inevitable collapse.

These perceptions and observations rely on a particular worldview or lens, in which things can be perceived as successful or otherwise, independent of other things. As Gregory Bateson once remarked (via Tim Parks),

"There are times when I catch myself believing there is something which is separate from something else."

Perceptions of success and failure are also dependent on timescale and time horizon. The dinosaurs ruled the Earth for 140 million years.

There may also be strong opinions about which things get protection and which don't. For example, some people may think it is more important to support agriculture or to rescue failing banks than to protect manufacturers. On the other hand, there will always be people who disagree with the choices made by governments on such matters, and who will conclude that the whole project of protecting some industry sectors (and not others) is morally compromised.

Furthermore, the idea that some things are "too big to fail" may also be problematic, because it implies that small things don't matter so much.

A common agenda of the disruptors is to tear down perceived barriers, such as regulations. This is subject to a fallacy known as Chesterton's Fence, assuming that anyone whose purpose is not immediately obvious must be redundant.

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Simon Jenkins, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt will have to ditch no deal – or face an election (Guardian, 28 June 2019)

Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Polity Press, 2018)

Tim Parks, Impossible Choices (Aeon, 15 July 2019)

Rory Sutherland, Chesterton’s fence – and the idiots who rip it out (Spectator, 10 September 2016)


Related posts: Shifting Paradigms and Disruptive Technology (September 2008), Arguments from Nature (December 2010), Low-Hanging Fruit (August 2019)

Evolution or Revolution 2

@ceciiil asserts a difference between @oscarberg and @bduperrin in his post E2.0 Evangelists : the Revolutionaries and the Evolutionaries (March 24, 2010).

I'm not convinced by this distinction. Cecil says that revolutionaries believe in disruption and evolutionaries believe in incremental change. But these beliefs are not mutually exclusive. In a simple linear world perhaps, incremental change is unlikely to be disruptive. But in a complex dynamic world, incremental change can often trigger disruptive change. (There is a branch of mathematics called Catastrophe Theory, dedicated to the study of such non-linear phenomena. And Hegelians define dialectics as the transformation of quantity into quality - see for example Anti-Dühring by Frederick Engels.)

So I have long argued that the difference between evolution and revolution is largely a difference of perspective. Not either/or but both/and.

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The following is an extract from Chapter 5 of my book on the Component-Based Business (Springer 2001).

A sudden change is often described as a revolution. A progressive change over time is often described as an evolution.

Even in biology, the distinction between sudden change and slow change is problematic. If you had been sitting on the seashore many millions of years ago, you might have seen the first sea creatures crawl onto land, and this might seem a sudden and dramatic event, from a human perspective. However, a squid might see this event as relatively unimportant, merely as one of many tentative explorations by a few creatures at the margins of the oceans, or as a fairly routine extension to previous innovations within a large and diverse community of sea creatures.

Many present-day commentators characterize the emergence of computing, or the Internet, or E-Business, as revolutionary. From one perspective, these appear to be previously unseen phenomena, emerging suddenly into public awareness from the obscurity of some other domain. From another perspective, the same phenomena appear to be a natural consequence of a large number of independently planned and executed moves by a large number of engineers, businessmen and others, whose origins can be traced back to innovations made years ago, decades ago, perhaps even centuries ago.

Thus the same phenomenon can be described as revolutionary AND evolutionary at the same time, depending on where you’re standing, and the amount of history you’re prepared to absorb.

If I describe a change as revolutionary, I’m inviting you to concentrate your attention on certain aspects of the change. I want you to see it as a dramatic break with the past, with sweeping implications across a fairly wide domain.

If I describe a change as evolutionary, I’m inviting you to take a different perspective. I want you to be aware of the links between the past and the future, and the extent to which previous patterns and innovations are being adapted and reused.

Some people feel safer with evolutionary descriptions of change, while others feel happier with revolutionary descriptions. As a manager or consultant, I might feel the need to motivate some people, while reassuring others. Sometimes I want to emphasize continuity; at other times, I want to emphasize novelty. At least from a logical point of view, I’m not necessarily contradicting myself if I describe things differently for different stakeholders – although there may be ethical or practical difficulties if the descriptions diverge too greatly.

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Related Posts

Evolution or Revolution (May 2006)

Shifting Paradigms and Disruptive Technology

Why on earth would technologists wish to claim that their favourite innovation is a "disruptive technology", let alone a "paradigm shift"?

Disruptive technologies are like awkward adolescents - rude, unreliable, difficult. As Tim O'Reilly pointed out several years ago

"Disruptive technologies are often not "better" when they start out -- in fact, they are often worse. Case in point: the PC. It wasn't better than the mainframe or minicomputer. It was a toy. Similarly, the WWW was far less capable than proprietary CD-ROM hypertext systems, and far less capable than desktop apps. And developers of both derided it as slow, ungainly, and ineffective. This is a typical response to disruptive technologies." [Lunchtime Keynote at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, May 8, 2002]

More examples from the IT world: relational databases, object orientation, anything by Christopher Alexander.

Paradigm shifts are even worse. In science, the new paradigm is supposed to be incommensurable with the old one. As Paul Feyerabend pointed out, even the basic concepts have to be reinterpreted to fit the new paradigm. So if something is easy to understand and quick to adopt, then it probably isn't a paradigm shift. [For a quick introduction, see Steven Shaviro on Against Method.] Bruno Latour's sociological take on science and technology is probably more relevant than Kuhn/Popper/Feyerabend/Lakatos these days, but even his account doesn't exactly encourage us to overuse these terms.

I guess we aren't supposed to take these terms literally. Randall C. Willis, the Executive Editor of Drug Discovery News, reckons the presence of these two terms is a dead giveaway for unfounded hype. His article Hopped up on Hype (October 2005) presently ranks top in an internet search for "paradigm shift disruptive technology".

Presently coming second, somewhat to my surprise, is the piece that made me put aside my other work to write something here - a blogpost called Event Servers, A Disruptive Technology by one Perren Walker of Oracle, extolling the virtues of Event Servers in general and Oracle's Event Server in particular. I arrived at this piece via Opher Etzion of IBM, who responded with a piece called On Event Processing as a paradigm shift.

Opher make the paradigm shift sounds like an exercise in navigating through some topological space - avoiding barriers and finding new avenues. I certainly agree that this is a good source of metaphors for change management, including technology change management.

But why call it a paradigm shift? What's so cool about paradigm shifts, and why are vendors boasting of the disruptive qualities of their products?