Saturday, May 17, 2025
Saturday, May 17, 2025
by Martin Pettinati:
We All Want to Be Disruptive…but no one wants to be disrupted.
This idea is at the core of how businesses operate: those that succeed and those that don’t. We live in an era in which innovation, disruption, and market revolutions are worshiped. Figures like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Jobs have become the modern-day Magi, coming to bring us magic, prosperity, and wonder.
However, it needs to be said that the disruptiveness that characterizes them three is not always well-received, especially when we look at those whose businesses are affected by such disruptive innovation. Let’s take a closer look:
Back in the 1960s, sociologist Erving Goffman published a series of articles in which he spoke about the tacit rules that govern our interaction. Around the same time, another sociologist, Harold Garfinkel, conducted a series of experiments that highlighted these rules through their transgression.
Erving Goffman & Harold Garfinkel
For example, he would enter a store, show interest in a product and, after asking about the price, he would offer to pay a higher amount. Contrary to what one might assume –and everything that the capitalist doctrine since Adam Smith onward advocates– the store owner would not accept this offer, and would often get irate. How could that be?
Part of the answer to this question lies in boundaries. Humans like to know what and where the boundaries are, because that knowledge gives us a sense of security and control: we know what is allowed and what is not.
We accept playing a game as long as the rules apply to all players.
Furthermore, the answer to this question, as it emerges from Garfinkel’s experiments, is related to the back-and-forth we experience today — and have been experiencing since the past few years — about returning to the office, remote work, and the future of work organization. It turns out that this field, too, operates on a series of tacit rules. And as things keep taking place outside of the ordinary, these rules become evident, and it starts to become clearer that not all of us are playing the same game, nor with the same rules. Let’s see why and how.
Around mid-March 2020, when it became unfeasible to keep down-playing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, most organizations were forced to adopt a remote work model. It’s a pity that both Goffman and Garfinkel had passed away long before, because this was exactly the situation they described almost 60 years in advance. Facing an abnormal phenomenon of global scale, the tacit rules of our interaction come to the surface. And the limits of reality are put to the test.
First, there was a wave of organizations that publicly communicated their decision to switch to remote work. Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, Quora. A cynical observer might point out that it may not have been a real decision, but rather an attempt to simulate control over a decision actually made by public health authorities. But let’s not go there. The point is that all these companies could have adopted this model years before the pandemic. In their pre-pandemic reality, it was not seen as a possibility. But when those tacit limits of our reality are broken, new possibilities open up.
It didn’t take long for the representatives of a second wave to speak up, not exactly proclaiming their decision as a strategy against the pandemic but rather as an attempt to replicate the strategies implemented by those other pioneering organizations. Perhaps because it looked good from a marketing perspective, perhaps because it helped them recruit talent, perhaps because it was financially cheaper than renting an office or, perhaps even –why not?– because it really seemed like the sensible thing to do.
But the reality is significantly less simple and straightforward. Some people would never want to return to the office, but there are others who can’t wait to go back. And it’s just as true that there are people who would like to have the option to go when necessary and work remotely the rest of the time.
Similarly, some people would like to work four days a week and rest the remaining three. Yet, there are others who have no problem working the same days as we currently do, but would like to do so for fewer hours. And there are many who simply wish they could work without a fixed schedule.
Reality is a complex matter because such a thing doesn’t exist. The closest thing to an idea of reality is an uncertain combination of all individual realities.
This is what emerges from situations like those that Goffman and Garfinkel created with their experiments, and when a viral outbreak hits the brakes on our daily lives: it becomes evident that reality is a collective construct, a series of agreements.
In his 1929 book Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud wrote,
“Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom implies responsibility, and most people are afraid of responsibility”.
There lies the crux of the problem with agreements. The majority of our lives are built based on a series of agreements: what can and can’t be done, what should and shouldn’t be done; which things have a price and which things are priceless, what things have value but no price; what we can know but cannot say, what we must know to be able to say; etc.
Additionally, most of these agreements predate our existence. People who left this earth a long time ago made agreements with their contemporaries, and they passed to later generations a stern respect for those agreements. Culture is precisely and exactly that. Other agreements are more recent and occurred just a few years ago, among people who are often no longer involved in the domain over which those agreements govern, without that absence affecting their validity. We could even say that some agreements you made yourself some time ago were made by a person you no longer are.
There lies the crux of the problem with agreements. Making them visible, as Goffman and Garfinkel did by force, is problematic because it confronts us with our freedom to change them and, as Freud rightly points out, it confronts us with the responsibility to create new –and of course, better– agreements.
When we face all that freedom and all that responsibility, all our rationality goes down the drain, and the only law that applies is the logic of the lizard.
In behavioral biology, the 3 F’s –Freeze, Flight, and Fight– describe a set of instinctive reactions to imminent danger, perceived danger, or instability. These reactions are grouped under the name of reptilian brain in Paul McLean’s Triune Brain model. In concrete terms, it’s not strictly a brain per se, but a bundle of behaviors based on emotional reactions, which emanate from a particular region of our brain.
These behaviors have been encoded in our genes over millions of years, and we share them with almost all living beings. That’s why they’re called the reptilian brain, and I like to think that their manifestation in our daily lives is the application of the logic of the lizard.
When a lizard detects a predator, its first instinct is to stay very still. It even lowers its heart rate and becomes completely motionless to avoid detection. In a world where most predators have a vision highly adapted to detecting movement, this is a very effective strategy.
When faced with a problem, humans often adopt this logic as well. When it became impossible to deny that we were in the midst of a pandemic, the primary reaction was paralysis. I’m sure you can remember it well: your clients didn’t want to buy until they knew what was going to happen next, investors didn’t want to move their money until they knew what was going to happen next, companies didn’t want to hire people until they knew what was going to happen next. And surely you didn’t want to make any moves until you knew what was going to happen next.
If I do nothing –the logic of the lizard says– I have no chance of making mistakes.
Everyone paralyzed, then, until one of two things happens: one of your competitors starts to move, and it becomes evident that staying still means losing to the competition; or too much time goes by, and the market starts to demand a decision is made.
What almost never happens is that things return to normal, and staying still was the best response. The problem lies in believing that a moment will come when one “knows what’s going to happen next”. Futurology is just as false in December 2019 as it was in March 2020 or August 2022, or as it was yesterday. We never know what’s going to happen next. We are never capable of predicting the future.
What does change is our perception of the certainty we have regarding our ability to predict the future. The lizard feels more comfortable with the prediction that what has been happening for the last four days will also happen on the fifth day.
When the lizard realizes that, despite being perfectly still, the predator has detected it, it can no longer stay put. The second instinct is to flee. During the pandemic, the flight mechanism became evident when, faced with the imposition of movement restrictions, we saw the first wave of leaders proclaiming they would never return to the office.
If we’re in a pandemic –the logic of the lizard says– and we can’t stay arms crossed waiting to know what’s going to happen next, we have to flee in the opposite direction: no more going to the office. Ever.
The problem, once again, is believing that a moment will come when “one knows what’s going to happen next”. The lizard in our brain, however, has realized that staying paralyzed is useless and wants to flee. In the rush to flee, the lizard makes no considerations: some are satisfied, and others are not, but none have been understood.
The lizard is not one to understand: it simply reacts to the stimuli in its environment. Post-war aftermath has the difficult task of explaining the mass layoffs during the early stages of the pandemic, and the mass resignations of employees when their employers decide to return to mandatory in-person work.
When the lizard realizes that its predator is too close, or that it is equal to or faster than itself, and therefore at a serious risk of being caught, it gives up fleeing, and the third and final instinct is to fight.
This is the behavior that characterizes leaders who joined the second wave of 100% remote work, with no office ever again. That wave is not motivated by a flight from what no longer works, but by a need to fight against the competition.
If my competitors close their offices and adopt a remote model –the logic of the lizard says– I will have to go down that path too, or resign myself to losing to their more competitive costs and dynamic workforce.
This is the capital difference between the first and second waves: they are equal in their effects, but they differ in their motives. The problem, in this case, beyond believing that a moment will come when one “knows what’s going to happen,” is interpreting the situation as a fight against the competition, when the real adversary is the context. And, of course, uncertainty.
So, what can we see between disruption and agreements?
We all want to be disruptive, but no one wants to be disrupted.
While some markets operate as the meeting point between distinct and complementary needs, others operate as a breaking point between ways of doing things that are also distinct but not complementary.
The education sector, for example, is a bidirectional market: there are those who want to teach, and those who want to learn. The dynamics of this market fluctuate based on supply and demand but are relatively stable: there will always be those who want to learn and those who are willing to teach. There is a complementarity between the two. Of course, there are elite institutions that employ strategies to create artificial scarcity, since this creates entry barriers that justify the astronomical figures they charge their students. This, in turn, sets the stage for an economy of diplomas and certificates, where organizations only hire those who are in possession of these certificates, and we all know where this leads and how it works. But let’s not get confused. That’s the education market, which is very different from the learning economy: it is still possible to learn and teach outside those circuits.
On the other hand, there are unidirectional markets, in which supply, upon finding demand, destroys the rest of the supply. When, in January 1886, Carl Benz patented the vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine, he sealed the fate of horse-drawn transportation. We’ve seen similar processes with the steam engine and handcrafted manufacturing, with the internet and the fax machine, with P2P transfers and the music industry. Disruption gives rise to unidirectional markets.
Soon we will see the same process with organizations that refuse to adopt a comprehensive approach to their businesses, employees, and context.
We began by saying that we all want to be disruptive, but no one wants to be disrupted. What we didn’t say is that one can’t really choose. Sometimes disruption comes to us through competition, and the lizard living in our brains will have to react, adapt, and survive. Other times, we are ourselves the architects of that disruption, and we will then have the responsibility to pave the way through uncharted territories.
We follow leaders because we have confidence, not in their map, but in their compass.
As I mentioned at the beginning, this relationship between disruption and agreements is at the core of how businesses work: those that succeed and those that don’t. Successful businesses know how to be disruptive without inflicting violence upon the markets they enter, and they also know how to adapt and accommodate in the face of disruptions from extrinsic forces. Businesses that don’t succeed, on the other hand, are those that jump into disruptive innovation without empathetic intelligence and that, when faced with the innovative advance of the competition, they react with complaints and demands, expecting the world to speed up when they want it to speed up, and to stop when they can’t catch up.
But fundamentally, successful businesses are conscious businesses: those that understand that the majority of our lives are built around a series of agreements, and that it is just as valid to respect them and to enforce them, as it is to undo and rebuild them to match the type of life we live today, the type of people we are today, and the type of relationships we have with others today.
These conscious businesses are the ones that understand that the drive for disruption holds equal measures of freedom and responsibility. They understand that disruption reconfigures the context, and thus new agreements must be forged to reflect the nature of those new contexts. Because, in the end, we humans accept to play a game as long as we know that the rules apply to all players equally. The freedom to break must be accompanied by the responsibility to rebuild.
Conscious businesses are aware of their fragility and volatility, that nothing is permanent except change and uncertainty. That the greatest strength is the ability to adapt, transform, and build trust. Conscious businesses have nothing to fear from disruption. The rest just come and go, as any other lizard.
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Martin Pettinati is a Madrid-based strategic marketer obsessed with bringing clarity to businesses all over the world. He is a #WeLeadComms honoree.
Written by: Editor
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