Digital technology moves through our landscapes like a tornado, stripping away the familiar while installing a new order.
Disruption
Digital technology moves through our landscapes like a tornado, stripping away the familiar while installing a new order. In some ways, we’re increasingly nonplussed by astonishing change. In other ways, we are constantly being taken by surprise. After two decades of relentless change, you’d think we would get used to it.
As technical capabilities explode, it’s increasingly possible to reconsider the impossible. Barely five years ago, the consensus of the scientific community was that driving could never be automated. The obstacle was left hand turns into oncoming traffic. There were simply too many variables. No imaginable data processing scheme could handle that much information.
Today, Google’s fleet of self-piloted vehicles are logging thousands of hours on the road. It only took one eighteen month generation of technology to move the impossible into the here and now. The pace of technical change, operating like an accelerating drumbeat in the background is constantly rearranging the things we think of as normal.
Disruption
There are two kinds of innovation, sustaining and disruptive.
Sustaining innovations produce more of the same and a faster more efficient pace. Much of the automation in enterprise software is really sustaining innovation. It automates existing processes rather than transforming them. Sustaining innovations maintain and improve the status quo. Examples are everywhere: better razorblades, wrinkle-free shirts, run flat tires.
Disruptive innovations change the playing field. They rearrange the status quo. They take existing processes and turn them on their ears. Like the Google car example , the impossible becomes possible.
At the heart of disruptive change is the rate at which technology expands. Most of our world operates on linear change; things get a little bit better all the time. Technology creates exponential change. Computer processing capacity doubles each year.
Math teachers illuminate this dynamic with the rice problem. If a chessboard were to have rice placed upon each square such that one grain were placed on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and so on (doubling the number of grains on each subsequent square), how many grains of rice would be on the chessboard at the halfway point?
1,073,741,824.
That’s one billion seventy three million seven hundred forty one thousand eight hundred and twenty four. A contemporary computer chip is 1 billion times as powerful as the 1980 version. Today’s smartphones are more powerful than the most expensive supercomputer of the mid 1980s, the Cray. Each year is a square on the chessboard.
And, when it doubles again next year, it will dwarf this year’s capacity. This is the underlying rhythm of our times. It’s at the heart of Amazon’s rise to prominence as the largest retailer. It explains how and why the global economy now runs on outsourcing.
Disruption is not limited to things that are somehow ‘out there’. In recent memory, recruiting evolved from a purely reactive discipline to a proactive profession focused on specific results. Old school recruiters harvest what comes in over the transom. New school recruiters identify the talent they want and hunt it down. The result is better, faster hires. The process is enabled by all sorts of technology from search engines to social media.
