In-flight magazines are an under-appreciated source of information. Many who criss-cross South Africa on domestic flights use mobile devices or laptops to respond to the innumerable emails which pile up, or quickly add the final finishing touches to presentations they are about to deliver in a city on the other side of the country. However, occasionally, one has the time to reach into the seat pocket ahead of you – or download an electronic version – and pass the one to two hour flight with a bit of reading. 

Airlink’s April 2023 in-flight magazine, “Skyways”, has an interesting insight for anyone interested in business, in an article titled “Risking for Reward” by Juanita Vorster, on page 46 of the hardcopy, where the concept of disruption is explored. “Disruption” has become a buzzword in the business sector, added to the commercial lexicon as somewhat of a cliché and jargon. What does it mean however, and what is its utility?

According to Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, who teaches the online course, Disruptive Strategy: “Disruption is the process by which a smaller company—usually with fewer resources—moves upmarket and challenges larger, established businesses. In both low-end and new-market disruption, incumbent businesses are motivated by higher profit margins to not fight the new entrant for market share.” 

According to Professor Christensen, there are three types of innovation and in turn disruption:

1) Sustaining innovation, in which a company creates better products to sell for higher profits to its best customers.

2) Low-end disruption, in which a company uses a low-cost business model to enter at the bottom of an existing market and claim a segment, causing incumbent businesses to retreat upmarket to make higher profit margins.

3) New-market disruption, in which a company creates and claims a new segment in an existing market by catering to an underserved customer base, slowly improving in quality until incumbent businesses’ products are obsolete.”

If disruption leads to innovation which in turn increases profits, why is every business not a disruptor? Returning to Vorster’s article, she makes the observation that: “Only 25% of the world’s population is comfortable with changing the status quo and doing things with an innovative twist. These individuals are called disruptors or innovators. As businesses struggle to create success in sectors that have been disrupted by technological advances, these individuals are now highly sought-after and rare.

The main difference between those who disrupt and those who are disrupted is their dependence on comfort.” 

Discomfort is a strong motivator for disruption. The more uncomfortable one is with the status quo, the more likely one would want to disrupt the status quo. Disruptors are very uncomfortable with the status quo. To better understand discomfort as a motivator, Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Daniel Todd Gilbert, an American social psychologist and writer, hypothesised the region-beta paradox. 

A typical example for illustrating what the region-beta paradox is, is a hypothetical protagonist in a not-preferred job or non-ideal romantic relationship. If someone is currently in a not-preferred job, they will be less likely to leave it to find an ideal job, than if their current job was intolerable, thus making their current overall situation worse. In other words, if their circumstances are barely bearable, they will have no desire to seek the ideal. However, if their circumstances are unbearable, they will go out of their way to seek the ideal. 

Disruptors look at their circumstances, the context which surrounds them and want innovation and improvements that take them out of their comfort zone. They are brave, “think outside of the box”, and may be uncomfortable with the comfortable. They are the rarity simply by how the human brain is designed. 

Vorster explains: “The human brain is designed to conserve energy as a survival mechanism. It does this by creating neural pathways that drive unconscious behaviour – habits – for tasks we perform on a regular basis. Any new task or activity requires effort, and the brain will always try to revert to habits already formed.”

Disruptors are able to overcome their neuro-biological makeup and operate outside of their “comfort zone”. 

Vorster concludes: “The discomfort of disruption is what drives businesses and individuals to seek alternatives to change – such as denial, delay and undermining tactics – even though they know that the world as we knew it will never return. Only once we retrain ourselves and our workforces to become more comfortable with being uncomfortable will we be able to turn disruptive threats into opportunities for success.”

“Business-as-usual” is a comforting space to occupy, however it is insufficient in an ever-changing, fast-paced, ever-evolving business world. Being in a comfortable space may be dangerous, we may be in the region-beta paradox and be surprised by being left obsolete. Instead, overcome the difficulty of bypassing evolved neurological pathways, find comfort in the uncomfortable and find ways to disrupt!