A642.7.3.RB - Leading through Disruptive Times

A642.7.3.RB - Leading through Disruptive Times

Reflect on the relationship between innovation and disruptive innovation from the perspective of leadership.

What would you do to help navigate your organization through each of these situations?

            Innovation and disruptive innovation can almost be synonymous. Innovation itself is a disruption of the status quo. Disruptive innovation is less a single event than a process that plays out over time, sometimes quickly and completely, but other times slowly and incompletely (Wessel, 2012). Either way, something changes. Something about how we do business today will change. Innovation and disruptive innovation are ways that we try to control the changes so that we can see what’s coming.

            Navigating through either one, innovation or disruptive innovation, would be complex and take well thought out strategies. For innovation, something that came out of a controlled environment like a workshop, I would navigate the changes by using creative thinking strategies such as Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats. As I discussed last week, the six hats are: White Hat (Neutral/objective), Yellow Hat (Optimism/values/benefits), Black Hat (Judgement/Devil’s advocate), Green Hat (Possibilities/alternatives/new ideas), Red Hat (Feelings/hunches/intuition), and Blue Hat (Managing the thinking process/the control hat) (Canfield & Smith, 2011). This thinking strategy would allow the group to see the idea through the different lenses of the thinking hats. It enables discussion and collaboration. For disruptive innovation, which seems almost more aggressive, the thinking strategy would be just as important because when organizations look to disrupt their own products in an effort to beat the competition. According to Wessel, there are three things to do: identify the strengths of your disrupter’s business model; identify your own relative advantages; evaluate the conditions that would help or hinder the disrupter from co-opting your current advantages in the future (2012).

Now, consider the likelihood of both occurring at the same time; would this change the way you navigated or lead the organization through these scenarios?

            The likelihood of both innovation and disruptive innovation happening at the same time are actually more likely in my organization than not. This would change some of the ways I navigated or lead the organization through the scenarios. With the many organizations working their own innovation projects, we are all impacted when a disrupter hits. For example, in the tooling organization I worked in, our main innovation project was based on alloys and finding better ways to make tooling to build airplanes. We were all working and focused on our own projects when the lithium ion battery fires happened in the 787 program. We were all suddenly on the task of finding a way to fix this issue. Granted, that is more of a safety innovation but it changed the way we built the 787 and especially how we install and contain the batteries. The necessity for innovation in this case was the disrupter – as will all safety concerns. This makes me think that disrupter innovations aren’t always about new business but sometimes about saving an existing business. If we weren’t able to find a solution to the 787 battery issue, that program would have been a huge and costly aerospace failure for Boeing. [S]ome radical innovations have very little impact on the success of the people who made them work. It is also often the case that relatively small innovations have a hugely disruptive impact (McKeown, 2014).

References

Canfield. J. & Smith, G. (2011). Imagine: Ideation skills for improvement and innovation today. Holland, MI: Black Lake Press.

McKeown, M. (2014). The innovation book: How to manage ideas and execution for outstanding results. Edinburgh Gate, Harlow, United Kingdom. Pearson Education Limited.

Wessel, M. & Christenson, C.M. (2012) Surviving disruption, Harvard Business Review.12.10. 56-64.