January 21, 2021

Disrupting

(Maintaining)

“The spiritual is political. It’s not about me it’s about us and about our future. Change always comes from the margins, those arenas that are mocked and dismissed. The definition of disruption is that which we can’t see coming…” Marianne Williamson

Urban myths say ship’s logs dating from the Colonial Era, relate stories of how indigenous peoples of the then-new worlds did not “see” the sailing ships of Columbus, Magellan and Cook. The tragic significance being that they apparently did not recognize the threat to their ways of life based on initial visual appearances. We resonate empathically with stories such as this that speak to a certain blind spot in the human condition —that tendency to take the tangible world at face value. There is much to be learned from this often told story of clashing world views. On the one hand it demonstrates that seeing is a complex body-mind event that is in no way limited to the neuro-physiological mechanics of eye, brain and nervous system. It hints at the complexity of our process of making meaning, and how the construction of mental schemas helps us to bring apparent order to our reality. It suggests how idiosyncratic and culturally situated those mental schemas are. And finally, it suggests the mutability and evanescence of Reality.

Because our beliefs become our reality, and vice versa, our beliefs and norms lend solidity and stability while also retarding change. Because we call these patterns that confirm and reinforce our ideas about the past “reality”, true innovation is often unrecognizable when it arrives. When an experience doesn’t fit our mental model we may not have “eyes” to see innovations that improve upon our current cultural agreements. When we don’t “see” radical, disruptive innovations, it’s because they don’t fit our idea of what is normal and/or they may actually be ahead of their time. Failure to “see” might indicate that a particular new technology for example is disruptive of business as usual to the point where we reject it without consideration. Or it might be that we “see” an incremental innovation as a waste of time or as inefficient. Then again we might “see” a reverse innovation as a “primitive throwback.” Carrying on with this analogy we might say that early adopters have mental models that accepts the innovation, thus enabling them to “see” the benefits or upsides. In each case we see the role of body-mind in organizing, prioritizing and filtering information about reality. And we are reminded that reality is a multiplicity and that every worldview is valid and consistent on its own terms. Because diffusions of innovation occur within stratified and emergent cultural contexts, a society is receptive and available to innovations that are timely—fitting reasonably enough within collectively held agreements that early adopter behaviors can be “seen” by the majority, yet still advanced enough to be aspirational.

Designers, engineers and entrepreneurs are duly humbled by the recognition that the diffusion and penetration of any innovation is contingent on its resonance or lack of resonance with an entire spectrum of world views reflective of values tribes, within which individuals position their unique mental schemas. This complexity of the field of reception means that extreme users, early adopters and laggards are representative of collective beliefs, values, norms and behaviors. When we understand the field of reception for pathbreaking ideas as stratified by worldview, we can better appreciate the social nuances involved in addressing impediments to disruptive innovation. It also becomes easier to see that approaches to reimagining and redesigning existing structures must operate on a spectrum of channels in order to effectively reach people at the level of their deepest cares and concerns for their lives.

Better appreciation for how great ideas connect with the mental models of those we serve, allows pathbreaking innovations to succeed in the marketplace as a means to ultimately being embraced by individuals as part of their overall lifestyle. Innovation may take forms as varied as the world views represented by our world population in aggregate. Innovations are complex unfolding interplays between artifacts and their environs. Reverse-, disruptive-, leapfrog, and open- innovation are dialects — ways of expressing approaches to innovating—skillfully listening and dialoguing with a range of values contexts. Innovation is inherently messy due to their disruption of the coupling between our stable mental models and our motile reality.

The probability of adverse or unintended consequences always has to be weighed against the potential benefits and freedoms. Because each innovation has inscriptive impacts far beyond beyond its introduction, we cannot gauge with certainly the long-term efficacy or safety of a fresh idea based strictly on its form or means of diffusion. This requires careful ongoing atunements of innovative agencies in multivalent contexts of reception. Even though we can never possibly anticipate all the unintended consequences of a design innovation, we can take an anticipatory ethical stance that learns continuously from the patterns of the past. Looking back for example, at the diffusion of innovation and the collective consumer behaviors that accompanied the adoption of the automobile, we see that it changed fundamentally the nature of the developed world with respect to not just transportation but social status, infrastructure, our sense of time and notions of ease and convenience. And like any powerful emergent force, it set into motion unintended consequences that we have yet to grapple with such as peak oil, climate change, and fracking.

Wall-to-wall carpeting is an example of a collective cultural agreement that strongly influences behaviors in the developed world. Do we have a preference for furnishing our homes with wall-to-wall carpeting because it makes sense, or does it make sense to us because this is the custom and practice in our part of the world? The late Ray Anderson, founder of interface FLOR understood these inherent challenges when he set “unreasonable” goals for energy use and efficiency, for product take-backs, as well as new technologies dedicated to remanufacturing of used carpeting, one of the most prevalent constituents of landfill waste. Anderson knew that setting aggressive goals for his company could create tipping points that would influence the entire furnishings industry.

The ability to hold physical reality lightly without buying into it completely (Actualism) is a creative capacity ever more essential —as is the need to envision the healing and wholing necessary to remake the world. Our conventional mental model of innovation is that of a strategy that we “choose” to do or to apply to a world outside of ourselves. This is a hangover from the modern logic of command and control, an overt form of dualism. Designers and other facilitators are creatively evoking the emerging future by expanding the range of possibilities at the highest leverage points within the systems they inter-arise within. For example, the sharing economy is an opportunity to simultaneously enact conviviality and currency. Ultimately we collectively ARE the process of becoming and begetting the future.

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