4 Ways Disruption Can Fool You

… and how this is experienced in universities

Most organisations believe they understand disruption ... right up until the point they discover they have misread it. Disruption can fool you, yielding responses that are plausible, well-intentioned, and entirely wrong.

Responding to disruption, principally arising from a complex, dynamic operating environment, is a ubiquitous challenge for management. Some disruptive changes are relatively easy to address: they can be anticipated, have a constrained impact, and the organisations that are subject to them possess the resources and strategic acuity necessary to adapt. But not all disruptions are like that. Disruption is often deceptive, and can manifest in many different forms. It is easy to be misled, or indeed to mislead oneself.

Here are four ways that disruption can fool you. I will attempt to illustrate them by considering the current challenges in higher education, because this is a domain I understand, at least in part. The problems of disruption, and how to respond to it, are however generic, and readily apparent in many other settings.

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1. Fool me once …

Disruption can be multi-layered and multi-dimensional. Strategic challenges are rarely atomic, yielding a simple diagnosis associated with a readily discernible course of action. More often, they are composite and interdependent. In particular, they can be nested, one within the scope of another. The overwhelming temptation is to focus on the immediate challenge that presents itself, rather than seeing it in its broader setting.

Thus, to illustrate, in universities the immediate challenge is unsustainable funding arrangements. To focus, however, on funding alone is to miss the broader change in which it is enveloped: the democratisation and globalisation of higher education, technological disruption, the homogenising forces driving a narrowly competitive model, changing societal expectations, the transformation of the research enterprise, and so on. Though the funding issue cannot be avoided, and gives rise to near-term pain, it is not possible to address it absent a response to the wider nexus of change in which it is embedded. Indeed, responses designed to address the proximate problem may be wholly wrong in the broader context.

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2. Fool me twice …

Some disruptions are limited in scope. They affect only the operating environment of particular organisations, and are amenable to a local response. In general, the capacity to adapt or change to meet the disruption lies within the ambit of those organisations. Other disruptions, larger and more consequential, have systemic effects, and the response must therefore be systemic. The risks here are twofold: responding to a systemic change locally and partially, thus inadequately and unsustainably; or not responding at all, pending a system response that is then not forthcoming.

This phenomenon too is evident in higher education. The larger disruptions highlighted above require a systems response: changes in the structure of university degrees, in awards and credentials, in digital infrastructure, in patterns of collaboration, and more. Incentives will need to be rethought, and probably governance too, necessitating changes in the role of regulation. This cannot happen without system leadership, and in higher education that is precisely what is missing.

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3. Fool me thrice …

I have emphasised disruption in operating environments and the need to respond to it. Organisations also take action and innovate independent of external factors. They seek to change the game. This may, of course, be either well or ill-conceived. It can be easy, particularly when viewed from within an organisation, to lose track of whether you are reacting or taking the initiative. The two are often intertwined. The issue is that exogenous—externally driven—and endogenous—internally driven—changes have different characteristics. In the case of an exogenous change, inaction may often be the more risky choice, whereas in endogenous change the risk is directly associated with the change itself.

In universities, change is rarely well received. It is no wonder a former university President wrote a book entitled “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It”. Individual initiative and entrepreneurialism are supported, but structural and organisational change is very difficult and may be resisted. Necessary changes, required to adapt to a rapidly evolving environment, are seen as giving rise to risk, but as discussed, inaction may in fact carry far greater risk. Thus, for example, greater scrutiny and associated management processes, which are reasonable responses to a tightened regulatory environment, can be seen instead as wilful managerial imposition.

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4. Fool me again …

Often disruption has a long lead-time. Big shifts can be seen, dimly, approaching from a great distance, heralded by commentators and consultants. The effects may, however, not yet be evident. In these circumstances, early attempts to address the disruption are often disappointing or misaligned. After a time, even the most enthusiastic and far-sighted leaders may be inclined to discount a prospective disruption and revert to business-as-usual. The thing is that though large waves build slowly, eventually they crest, break, and run. You have to be there when they do.

The clearest example of this is the digital disruption of higher education and pedagogy: long heralded, yet only weakly apparent. Computer Aided Learning (CAL), classroom technology, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), digitally mediated lectures, and Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) have all made an appearance. They have changed some things, but have not delivered the wholesale transformation once predicted. Artificial Intelligence (AI) may alter that - I judge that likely - but whether it does or not, whether the next inflection is imminent or still some way off, the wave will crest, break, and run. When it does, our teaching, our institutions, and perhaps even our conception of the university will be unrecognisable.

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Taken together, these four misreadings of disruption point to a common failure: not a lack of attention or effort, but a tendency to see change at the wrong scale, in the wrong frame, or at the wrong moment. Disruption rarely announces itself clearly, and it is seldom kind to those who wait for certainty. For universities, as for many other institutions, the challenge is not simply to respond, but to develop the strategic capacity to distinguish signal from noise, local from systemic change, and urgency from panic.