Are you disruptive? Are you honest?

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Everybody loves to be disruptive, but to be disruptive is complex, difficult and only in the hands on some few companies.

When dealing with workshops sometimes I face the situation where something is drawn with high value/visibility for the consumer/user and tagged as something new, in its genesis.

Some people agree with the fact that such capability they are proposing to build is disruptive and is going to leave the users astonished with the proposition done by them.

Then, we find some people in the room that do not see it clear, they say that if they build it they will definitely be different and provide more value, but in the same competitive context.

In a Wardley Map, I would represent the conversation as follows:

Who is right?

Here we are not to “be right”, we are here to agree on a common view of the reality of the situation.

When something like this happens during the conversation there is the risk of being in disagreement with the higher role in the room. When that happens you have to be quick and try to avoid the general consensus stays in the side of the higher role in the room.

Are we disruptive?

I do not know, but Wardley Maps offer this table to identify when something is shown in a map and we want to position in the right stage of evolution. The table is this one:

How to use it?

  • Go with the group row by row, discussing about the right properties of what you are proposing.
  • Add assumptions to the future capability as soon as you detect thing that are not identify: shape your idea with concrete properties.
  • Select 2 stages when it’s not clear and continue with next row.
  • At the end, look at the table and see how many properties belong to a given stage.
  • Look at the situation with higher perspective and discuss again about it if there is not consensus.
  • The right stage is not the one with the more properties marked. The right stage for the component is the one with the consensus of the group.

Are you honest?

The majority of times I have faced this situation the initial view of having something defined as disruptive falls into other stage. People understand that they need to think more about the capability they are trying to build and here different feelings show up:

Some groups face the vertigo of understanding that if they want to build something disruptive they have to take more risks (at all levels).

Some groups fall in the trap of the higher role in the room and just follow it.

Some groups understand that they are trying to be different but they only can aspire to differentiate from the herd (the current competitive space they are).

Some groups say: ok, we accept the situation, Joaquín give us a week, we need to rethink the whole thing. They are happy because they recognize they are not being disruptive, but they are in the path to be disruptive as they start to identify what it does not mean to be disruptive.

At the end of the day, there are groups of people that are honest with themselves and others that just follow the political games of the organization.

Takeaways

Being disruptive is a complete process that takes time and a lot of work till you discover something really disruptive and then the organization is with the mindset of getting the challenge of building that potential disruption.

Many times we underestimate the value of being disruptive and we want to build something astonish without increasing our exposure to risks and uncertainty. This rarely happens.

What is critical for any team is the ability to be honest with the rest of the group. When you see on these workshops the positions to move to the “accepted position of the highest role in the room” then I feel sad, but at the same time I feel I do not know the whole story behind the scenes, so I have learned to respect the situation and their move.

The type of disruption I have mentioned above is a common known which is easy to identify for the casual reader. For those who are deep in knowledge of strategy and Wardley Maps, they probably know this article from Simon where he covers two types of disruption: https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/02/on-two-forms-of-disruptions.html

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