One of the main attractions of a disruptive event is that it tends to flatten the competitive environment, allowing small, nimble upstarts to enter into battle with old, entrenched incumbents at some level of relative parity. The same story tends to play out across business, technology, culture, and politics, among other domains of human activity: A breakthrough occurs, surprising success stories bubble up, and a new balance of power ensues.
■ That may be fine, as far as it goes, but it’s dangerous to forget that every existing order is generally the product of lots of small corrections, forgotten iterations, and embedded pieces of information that incrementally built up along the way. Even an object as seemingly simple as a bathroom faucet represents a long cumulative history of changes that led to the present state.
■ Someone may come along and invent the revolutionary “HandWashr” app to completely disrupt the old industry, and it might even work. But the revolutionary step always risks omitting important insights from its incremental predecessor. And even when it does not, it still only resets the clock on a whole new generation of incremental changes to follow.
■ Sooner or later, the new innovation becomes the old order. It’s up to the broader public not only to recognize these tendencies, but also to prepare for the changes, Real disruptive events don’t make incremental changes go away, they just move us to a different place in the evolutionary cycle. Some useful knowledge is often lost in the the disruptive event, and we have to beware of the risk that the architects of the new reset don’t get away with pretending that they are immune to the need for their own corrective evolutions. Nobody is that brilliant.