Disruption is about the mindset, not the technology

As Uber holds city councils all over North America hostage, the talk about disruption and the fear of being disrupted grows. Who will be the next disruptor? What company will come along to disrupt other traditional businesses? 

What do you do if you're in an established industry? Do you copy banks like Stanbic IBTC, Standard Chartered, and start investing in tech companies hoping to own innovation and defend against disruption by buying it? I would argue no. 

Successful disruption comes from the experience, not the technology.

Let's look at the current darling, Uber, to understand this. 

Uber was not the first to offer a taxi service from an app. The real disruption comes from the experience. It's just better in every way - nicer cars, easy to order, pay linked to your card, and with UberX, less expensive as well. 

Before Uber, the experience of getting a taxi was not too good, we all know. Now, I know people that don't bother driving because it's so convenient and nice to Uber. Some even ‘group-Uber’, where four residents of Ikeja ride together to work at the Marina, and paying a single bill, saving a lot of money on transportation and the stress associated with driving in Lagos.

With Uber, the real disruption is the experience; the technology is the enabler.

How to disrupt yourself:

1. Love thy customer

I think true disruption comes from a passionate understanding and love of people. Data is a good starting point to develop understanding, but true caring is even more important. You have to have loved your customers enough to get not only what they want now, but what they will want.  Too many industries get so caught up in their own processes and needs that they forget about their customers. 

Uber would have never happened if the taxi industry was putting its customers first. It wasn't exactly a secret that the customer experience was crap. The technology existed to arrange everything from a smart phone. 

2. Put down the data and analytics, get out of your office and experience your service and products with people 

Experience for yourself both the points of joy and the points of pain people have with their interaction with your brand. Once you understand this on an emotional level, you can empathize with your customers. This empathy will give you inspiration to find innovative ways to remove their pain, amplify their pleasure and the knowledge to be able to personalise their experience.

3. Bring in outsiders

Disruptive start-ups come about as an idea of a founder, someone with vision. Rarely are they built by committees, brainstorm sessions, collaborative management. This is tough for big corporations with their inclusive management style and team-everything, 

Also, disruptive ideas tend to come from people outside the industry. People who have been locked in an industry for a long time, even if they’ve been outstanding, tend to see things more through the ‘industry's perspective’. Uber wasn't started by people from the taxi industry, please note.

Bring a small group of outsiders to give you a fresh perspective. Bring in a designer, a musician, a biophysicist, a tech person, or a creative person. These people will bring in fresh perspectives and aren't held back by industry best practices. Let them run with scissors developing innovative ideas. Take the best ideas and develop pilot programmes with your internal teams, charging them to find even more innovation in the implementation. 

4. C-Suite direct involvement

Whenever there isn't direct C-Suite involvement, a lot of great ideas die. And this is because when you present something truly breakthrough and new, it makes people nervous, and they immediately start second-guessing what their boss is going to think, and what their fate might be in the new equation. More often than not, the great ideas die, in favour of the less challenging ones. 

Starting with C-Suite involvement gives disruptive ideas a better chance.

5. Realize that if you don't disrupt yourself, chances are someone else will

Innovation and disruptive thinking are no longer a nice to have; they are essential for survival. Any company, no matter how successful it is, no matter what its market position, can be disrupted now by a new entrant that scales up globally so fast that by the time you see it coming, it may be too late. In Nigeria for instance, this radical change happened with the entry of Merc & Mei and Promasidor.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them, said Albert Einstein. So, my best advice is that you start now!

Wriiten by Andrew Shortt. He’s a creative director traditionally, who has helped the cpg industry and tech start-ups with disruptive thinking to help build their businesses. He’s on +647 924 0660.

Additional reports by ‘Dele Dele-Olukoju, a Marketing Communication strategist and publisher of the online Marketing Communication Digest. He writes from Lagos, Nigeria. +234 807 481 2389.