Michael Horn explains why established organizations freeze up when facing disruption. Leaders should first frame it as a threat to mobilize resources, then deliberately reframe it as an opportunity to enable small, autonomous teams that experiment and iterate quickly enough to lead the change rather than be crushed by it.
One of the biggest challenges that successful organizations have is surviving disruption. When they see a disruptive innovation afoot, they know that if they don't do something, they're going to get overrun by it, potentially in the long run. But responding to disruption is hard because it just doesn't feel natural. Remember those newspapers we all used to read back at the turn of the century? They saw online news coming and they're like, we've got to do something, but they just didn't know what. And they were in essence held captive by their existing business model. And we've seen what's happened to so many newspapers since then. So how do you survive disruption and even thrive or pioneer the disruptive innovation yourself? How does an existing organization do the disruption? Clark Gilbert did some really important research years ago looking actually at the newspaper industry. And what he saw is that the first thing you have to do when you see a potentially disruptive innovation is that you have to frame it as a threat. Why is that? Because framing it as a threat will motivate you to throw resources at the problem and really take it seriously. So the first thing to do is to frame it as a threat. And the way I like to think about that so I can get in that threat mode is you think of like that disruptive innovation. It's coming at you. It's like the Imperial March from Star Wars. Darth Vader's coming at you and you have to do something. Here's how I think about it. You get the idea. But here's the problem. If you leave it in that threat framing, then the organization gets super rigid. So you're motivated, you have the resources to tackle the problem. You're ready to go against Darth Vader. But now you're also kind of like Darth Vader. You're trying to move in that hard shell, awkward suit. You're super rigid. And you see a lot of command and control behavior in organizations when they leave it in a threat. Framing a lot of top down leadership, classic Darth Vader sort of stuff. And Clark Gilbert called this threat rigidity. And the problem with threat rigidity is this. You see the threat, you framed it as such, and you're dedicating resources to it. I mean, after all, Darth Vader's coming at you. But if you become rigid with those resources, it's the exact wrong response. Because no one at this stage knows what the disruptive innovation should really look like yet. How should it work? How will it help consumers? How do we design it? How do we structure the business. And so to figure all of that out you need to be the opposite of rigid. You need to be nimble. That means lots of fast testing of key assumptions, learning from those tests and then iterating. So the question then obviously is like how do you become nimble? And so it turns out that after playing the Imperial March and galvanizing the resources you then need to do a reframe to see this disruptive innovation as an opportunity. Think a million dreams from the Greatest Showman. Because the question should turn into this disruption is going to happen so why don't we do it and to frame it as an opportunity. Clark Gilbert found that you need to build an independent loosely connected organization and empower that small group of individuals to go and explore and pioneer the disruptive innovation because why not close your eyes and see that the world will only wait for you if you go out and allow an independent group to seize the opportunity for innovation.
