Why ‘Disruption’ Is the Wrong Word

The forces that reshape industries are slow, structural, and visible for years. The disruption narrative hides this, and the strategic consequences are serious.

Blockbuster, Kodak, Nokia. The business press tells these stories the same way every time: an innovator arrives, an incumbent falls, and nobody saw it coming. The language is always about surprise and speed, about being disrupted and overtaken.

The implication is that change arrives as an event. Something happens, suddenly, and the firms that survive are the ones that react fastest. This framing has shaped two decades of strategic thinking and produced an entire vocabulary built around speed: agile transformation, pivots, fail fast. If disruption is an event, then the correct preparation is reflexes.

I think this framing is wrong. And I think it leads to a strategic mistake that most firms are currently making.

The forces were visible for years

The European energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is a useful place to start, because it is recent enough that most executives remember living through it. Energy prices doubled and tripled within months. Firms that had treated energy as a background cost discovered it was their most pressing strategic concern. The business press described it as a disruption.

But the underlying forces had been visible for years. European dependence on Russian gas was well documented. The fragility of concentrated energy supply chains had been discussed in policy circles for more than a decade. The accelerating economics of renewable alternatives were measurable in investment data and deployment figures. A firm that had selected energy transition as a strategic theme before 2022 was positioned to absorb the shock. A firm that had treated energy as a background condition was exposed by it. The difference lay in whether the firm had read the structural forces and organised around them in advance, not in how fast it reacted when the crisis arrived.

This pattern repeats across every major “disruption” story when you examine the timelines rather than the headlines.

The internet was a curiosity when I first used it in 1994, arriving at university to find an email account waiting for me. It took another decade before e-commerce reached a scale that meaningfully threatened physical retail. Amazon was founded in 1994 and did not turn a consistent annual profit until 2003. The retail industry had nearly ten years of visible, measurable signal before online commerce became a force that could no longer be treated as marginal. The firms that were eventually described as “disrupted by Amazon” had a decade to organise around digital commerce. Most used that decade to optimise their existing store estates.

Electric vehicles tell a similar story on a different timeline. Tesla delivered its first Roadster in 2008. The forces behind it, battery cost reduction, tightening environmental regulation, and shifting consumer preference toward sustainability, were visible years before any traditional automaker described itself as disrupted. Most automakers treated EVs as a regulatory compliance exercise well into the mid-2010s, a full decade after the underlying forces were measurable.

The sustainability movement that reshaped personal care took a generation to travel from niche activism to mainstream consumer expectation. Unilever organised its entire strategy around this force, launching the Sustainable Living Plan in 2010 and tying executive compensation to sustainability targets. Over the following decade, Unilever’s purpose-led brands (Dove, Hellmann’s, Seventh Generation) grew 69% faster than the rest of the portfolio and delivered 75% of the company’s growth. The strategy has faced legitimate scrutiny since, particularly around whether the sustainability premium is durable in a cost-of-living crisis and whether Unilever’s operational performance matched its strategic ambition. But the competitive positioning was real: while competitors categorised sustainability as corporate social responsibility, Unilever treated it as architecture. By the time the rest of the industry caught up, Unilever had spent years building capabilities and supply chains around a force that others had been merely monitoring.

None of these were surprises. They were structural forces that built over years, were measurable throughout, and reshaped industries through sustained, compounding pressure rather than a single event.

The difference between a force and a fad

If most industry-reshaping change is slow and structural, then the strategic skill becomes the ability to distinguish between forces that will compound over decades and fads that will spike and disappear, rather than speed of reaction.

This is harder than it sounds, because at any given moment the business press is full of both. In 2013, Google Glass generated enormous coverage and trend reports predicting that augmented reality would transform every industry within five years. It disappeared within two. Cloud computing, by contrast, had been growing consistently since the mid-2000s, across economic cycles. Google Glass was a fad, and cloud computing was a force, but in real time both received comparable media attention.

I use three tests to separate the two. A candidate force must pass all three to qualify as what I call a strategic theme.

Has it been growing for ten or more years at a rate significantly greater than GDP growth? This is a retrospective test, and deliberately so. It filters out temporary enthusiasm. Electric vehicles pass. Segway scooters, launched with extraordinary hype in 2001 and still a niche product two decades later, do not. Cloud computing was a structural change already underway and measurable. The metaverse, as conceived in 2021, was a prediction about what might happen. Strategy built around predictions is speculation. Strategy built around structural changes already in motion is positioning.

An obvious objection is that some forces appear to arrive fast. Large language models went from a research curiosity to a boardroom priority within two years of ChatGPT’s launch. But the ten-year test is about the underlying force, not the product that makes it visible. The computational infrastructure behind LLMs, GPU processing power, large-scale data, transformer architecture, and cloud computing capacity had been building for well over a decade. What arrived suddenly was public awareness, not the force itself. The firms best positioned to capitalise on generative AI in 2023 were the ones that had been investing in computational infrastructure and data capabilities since the early 2010s. The product was new, but the force behind it was not.

Does it affect multiple industries? A force that reshapes only a single niche is too narrow to anchor a firm’s strategy. Ageing populations pass this test decisively. They reshape healthcare, financial services, housing, consumer goods, labour markets, and the care economy simultaneously. A firm that organises around them can find applications across its entire portfolio and across multiple geographies. The test is designed to filter out forces that are real but strategically insufficient. Telemedicine, for instance, is a genuine structural shift that has been growing for over a decade. But it affects healthcare delivery and, at the margins, insurance and technology infrastructure. A pharmaceutical company or a health system could build around it. A diversified conglomerate could not. The multi-industry test ensures that a theme creates enough strategic surface area to justify organising a firm around it.

Can a firm explicitly allocate capital and talent to it? This is the test that most candidate forces fail. “The world is becoming more uncertain” is an observation, not a theme. No firm can build an R&D programme around uncertainty. Renewable energy, by contrast, leads to specific investments, specific acquisitions, specific hires, and measurable targets.

Most firms’ current AI strategies fail this test. “We are investing in AI” is not actionable in the way the framework requires. It does not specify which AI capabilities the firm is building, which business decisions those capabilities will change, or how capital is being allocated against measurable milestones. A passing version looks more like “We are investing in machine learning for drug discovery, with a dedicated team, a three-year capital commitment, and quarterly milestones tied to pipeline acceleration.” The difference is between acknowledging a force and organising around it, which is the difference between awareness and strategy.

The severity of requiring all three tests is deliberate. My research showed that the firms which dominated their industries selected three or four themes, not twenty. The small number is part of what makes the approach work.

What disruption gets wrong about preparation

The disruption framing leads to a specific type of preparation, and it is the wrong one.

If you believe change arrives as events, you invest in agility. You build rapid-response capabilities, innovation labs, and organisational structures designed to pivot quickly when something unexpected happens. The logic is defensive: we cannot predict what will hit us, so we must be ready to move fast when it does.

Understanding change as structural forces leads to a different set of investments. It starts with foresight, the ability to identify which forces are structural, which are accelerating, and which are actionable. From there it requires positioning, the deliberate decision to organise your strategy around a small number of those forces, and the discipline to hold that position across leadership changes, recessions, and competitive pressure. Structural forces reward firms that stay committed to them over decades.

The firms in my research that achieved dominant profit share did not get there through agility. They maintained their strategic orientation across 20 years, through the dot-com crash, the 2008 financial crisis, and multiple changes in competitive dynamics. Their annual reports in 2019 emphasised the same types of external forces as their annual reports in 2001. That consistency reflected conviction rather than rigidity, built on correctly reading which forces were structural and committing to them before the rest of the industry caught up.

A different question

The disruption narrative encourages a question that sounds strategic but produces anxiety rather than clarity: “What could disrupt my industry?”

The question invites speculation about unknowable events, rewarding imagination over analysis and producing long lists of potential threats that cannot be prioritised with confidence because the framing assumes that the defining characteristic of disruption is surprise.

A more productive question starts from the opposite assumption. Instead of asking what might arrive without warning, ask:

Which structural forces have been building in my industry for a decade or more, affect multiple industries, and can be acted on through specific investment and resource decisions?

The first question generates scenario planning. The second generates strategy.

The forces are there. They are measurable. In most industries, the forces that will reshape the competitive landscape over the next fifteen years are already visible in academic research, government policy, demographic data, and technology adoption curves. The firms that will be described as “disrupted” in 2040 are, in many cases, already sitting in industries where structural forces have been compounding for years. They have access to the same information as everyone else. The question is whether they will use it to optimise their current position or to organise around where the world is going.

That choice, not the speed of their reflexes, is what will determine the outcome.