PERSPECTIVE
PERSPECTIVE
THE WAVE OF DISRUPTIONS
By Wale Akinyemi
Nobody saw it coming and when it came , it appeared that no one could do anything to stop it . Yes . The wave of disruption that gave us Uber , the world ’ s largest taxi company that owns no cars and Airbnb , the world ’ s largest hotel company that own no properties appeared to be on fast track .
As if that was not disruptive enough , the wave of disruption went into the political arena and left the world speechless . Rodrigo Durtete would curse and swear , admit to taking part in extra judicial killings and yet he emerged the president of the Philippines – and a popular one at that . The world woke up to the reality of a new word – Brexit as Britain voted to leave the European Union . Against all odds , a politically inexperienced rough talking outsider called Donald Trump was voted in as the next president of the United States .
With all this happening I have had a few clients ask me what perhaps is a very intelligent question under the circumstances and which probably should be the conventional position for 2017 - How do we insulate ourselves and our organizations against the Durtete , Brexit and Trump forces ?
Like I said , this makes sense but right now I believe our greatest goal should be to make sense out of nonsense ; and not to insulate our organizations against these forces .
A disruptor ’ s perspective however would be , ‘ how do we position ourselves to become the next driver of disruption in our field ?’ The rest of the world has watched and seen that forces of rebellion can win and many have been inspired so it ’ s just a matter of time .
Why are we seeing rebellions happening on massive populist scales ? First , we need to understand the dynamics of the age we are living in – especially the demographics .
When I was younger , we wrote letters and we would always finish the letter once we started ; we never stopped half way . When we started using computers , I remember having to understand the command prompt . To do documents , I would use Wordperfect and when I was done I had to shut it down , and if I wanted to do a spreadsheet I had to enter the prompt for Lotus 123 . Everything around me seemed to make a demand on me to be tolerant .
Today , the situation is different . We can have someone working on a Word document and at the same time have an Excel sheet open while chatting on Facebook as well . While all this is going on , they are also attending to messages on Whatsapp , sending tweets on twitter and sending pictures on Instagram .
Now the remarkable thing is that they are doing everything well ! This is where the problem now begins . When in an organization you have people who have been trained to be tolerant now having to lead people who have been trained by the system to be intolerant , how do we expect it to work ?
There is a mindset that governs the majority today and it is the mindset that has been conditioned by intolerance inducing systems .
For instance , research has shown that
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