In the 1990s, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen coined the term "disruptive innovation". By Christensen’s own definition, disruptive innovation “transforms a product that historically was so expensive and complicated that only a few people with a lot of money and a lot of skill had access to it. A disruptive innovation makes it so much more affordable and accessible that a much larger population have access to it.”
Leaders who latched onto this thinking included Apple’s Steve Jobs, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. It’s also the approach that has given us Netflix instead of broadcast television, Airbnb rather than grand hotels, and seen smartphones outshine desktop PCs.
Leveraging disruption doesn’t, however, come naturally to all leaders. So, in 2012, Christensen and researcher Maxwell Wessel turned their attention to helping leaders survive in the face of rising levels of disruptive innovation. This was a time of financial recovery after the 2008 crisis, a new leader in Beijing, and an Obama administration returning to the White House. It was the year of banking regulation, the Libor scandal and Facebook’s IPO. Wessel and Christensen’s Harvard Business Review article focused on the “missiles of disruption” that leaders needed to help them respond effectively in the face of disruption. Not by engaging in price wars or last-ditch-attempts to discredit new competitors, but by taking “stock of the entire situation” and meeting the disruption head-on. A systems thinking perspective, if you will.
Since disruptive innovations are fundamentally about going into new markets, and structuring offerings in a way that appeals to the many and not just the few, these 2012 survival tips hinted at the need for new business paradigms, revised ways of thinking, and deeper customer insights. That’s exactly the sort of thinking that company leaders, board members, and strategists are facing at the moment.
These “missiles” must be carefully directed from a strategic perspective by making conscious and informed decisions about where and how to operate. Imagine you are a global automaker. What do you do? Do you take on the mainstream electric vehicle dominance of China or create luxury vehicles that appeal to the elites? Do you focus on new markets and building up dominance, or old markets and creating differentiators? Do you plug into current technologies or open up fresh avenues?
How your organisation answers questions such as these reinforces the different tones and tensions that disruption ignites in people, businesses, and even countries. Context is always important, but particularly so when the foundations are being tested.
Business-schooled leaders often see disruption as a good thing, something linked to the notion of innovation – in line with Christensen’s thinking. For many others around the world, however, disruption is something out of their grasp or control and often associated with the nefarious dealings in the political sphere. This sort of geopolitical contentiousness has been emerging around the world for years but is now operating at scale. The result is exponential uncertainty.
As a result, the disruption discussion in 2026 is less about survival and more about fortifying yourself and your organisation with the skills to navigate the commotion. It’s about building capabilities that support a mindset that sees disruption in context and understands where you stand amid the maelstrom.
This is not about surviving, it’s more elegant than that. It’s about evolving.
By leveraging individual and collective capabilities – those carefully constructed toolboxes of insights, learnings, and experiences – leaders can navigate not only today’s change but anything that emerges in the future.
Bedding down
This is not the first time the world has faced such a complex combination of unpredictability, from climate change-related disasters to technological leapfrogs, shifting global power balances and fast-moving social mindsets. It is, however, the first time that many of us have found ourselves navigating such profound uncertainty. Yes, we can and should learn from the past to understand how previous generations faced change and challenge head-on, but we can also put faith in our own abilities to shape – rather than just respond to – change.
The competencies that should be atop any executive or manager’s personal and professional development agenda in 2026 are underpinned by reflection. It may feel like change and transition is swamping us all, gathering us up in its vortex and forcing us to react rather than plan and think, but this isn’t always the case. One breaks the cycle of uncertainty by actively pausing to think, to ponder, to explore connections, links, and emerging signs on the horizon. We see these shifts when we give ourselves permission to disengage from doing, take a step back, and survey the big picture – including the strengths, weaknesses, cultural leanings, and capabilities within ourselves and our organisations.
By understanding the capabilities and building blocks we have to work with, it is possible to stop pinning all hope on an elusive golden ticket and rather use this internal insight to lean into the disruption.
This doesn’t make the world any less uncertain. Let’s be frank, things are getting a bit crazy out there: geopolitics is all over the place, technological disruption and innovation are moving at breakneck speeds, and long-held certainties are fraying before our eyes. There is a lot to grasp and much to understand right now. Disruption can be scary, but we got this.
