Book Review: Disrupt with Impact

📖  This article is featured in illuminem’s Curated Booklist: the influential books shaping the world sustainability debate.

Title: Disrupt with Impact
Author: Roger Spitz
Publisher: Kogan Page
Publication: September 2024
Sustainability topics: Social Responsibility 🤝, Ethical Governance 🏛

In 1832, Carl von Clausewitz coined the term “fog of war.” Clausewitz argued that “three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.”

Fast forward to today, and many business strategists and MBA convenors tend to propagate principles of military doctrine, translating them into commercial contexts. Terms like “VUCA,” created by the US military in the 1980s, are habitually used in business circles - and for good reason.

VUCA stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. It describes contexts where seemingly far-flung events, such as a war in Ukraine or a freight ship being stuck in the Suez Canal, have a material impact on the lives of everyday people across the world. These events, for example, exacerbated global inflation and disrupted critical supply chains. Likewise, a bowl of bat soup in a single wet market in Wuhan can bring the global economy to its knees. It is doubtful that a risk management team at JP Morgan on Wall Street or Canary Wharf could have detected and mitigated the risks of the subsequent pandemic. In other words, they weren’t ready for the fog.

We are more interconnected than ever, but this presents substantial risks and uncertainty. While using VUCA has become somewhat cliché, it remains a fitting description of the modern world.

Roger Spitz tackles these issues in his latest publication, Disrupt with Impact. Targeted at business practitioners, the book interrogates common doctrines and principles of business strategy, identifying inadequacies in traditional approaches that lead to parochial, isolated, and siloed risk management cultures. Spitz encourages businesses not just to navigate uncertainty and steer through the fog, but to embrace it as an avenue for innovation. As Spitz argues: “we must develop mindsets and systems that strengthen from stress and disorder.” The book bases this argument on the idea of “antifragility,” as described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

For me, it’s this particular perspective that sets Spitz’s work apart from others. For too long, corporate risk management has been focused on risk without realising that navigating risk can actually be a springboard for value creation. While businesses need to be resilient - meaning they ‘bounce back’ from crises - they should also aim to be better, stronger, and more innovative as a result of crises. In other words, they should be antifragile.

This is compounded by Spitz’s call for organisations to adopt much more robust foresight practices and develop capabilities for anticipation. By doing so, they can build true resilience.

Standard business doctrine argues for maximising efficiency. However, Spitz correctly identifies this approach as short-termist and naive. After all, as he argues in the book, “the trade-off between efficiency and resiliency is a trade-off between fragile and antifragile.”

As such, Spitz introduces an evolved notion of VUCA: the acronym “UN-VICE.” This stands for Unknown, Volatile, Intersecting, Complex, and Exponential. As Spitz explains: “we must go beyond automatically relying on advice and start forming our own UN-VICE to survive… with intersecting, cross-impacts determining outcomes. The more connected everything is, the more combinatorial effects will interact… Exponential refers to the shape of change. Exponential change is initially slow; our cognitive biases expect it to continue linearly. This deceptive nature causes people to miss inflection points as the change accelerates.”

To illustrate this argument, Spitz points to the practice of share buybacks. Companies that parochially obsess over efficient capital deployment are fragile - stock buybacks raise stock value and hit short-term financial KPIs but diminish cash reserves and liquidity. Efficient capital deployment like this makes sense in a stable world, but when the fog sets in and VUCA circumstances manifest, these efficiency practices leave a company fragile. Alternatively, those who have focused on long-term resilience and avoided excessive stock buybacks are much less fragile. In fact, during times of crisis, they have more capacity to invest and show much more optionality. These companies are antifragile.

But antifragile companies are also anticipatory. They possess what Spitz describes as “futures intelligence,” meaning they can “interpret next-order impacts and connect the shifting dots” and often “challenge assumptions, especially given the non-linearity and timeframes of complex systems.”

As an avid futures practitioner myself, particularly in the realm of sustainable development, Spitz’s arguments strongly resonate with me. In policy circles, I’m always hearing about the need to overcome short-term bias and bounded rationality and to instead pursue intergenerational fairness and systems thinking. It sometimes feels like these discussions are not being had in risk management meetings within gleaming corporate offices. As gleaming as they may seem, short-termism and fragility can undermine even the most reputable of companies. Ask anyone from Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns if you don’t believe me.

Given this, Spitz promulgates a refreshing perspective on business strategy. Crucial pillars of anticipation, including imagination and improvisation, are not in the risk management DNA of many large companies. For many FTSE500 or NASDAQ-listed CROs, that’s synonymous with ragtag garage start-ups founded by college dropouts. Yet, Spitz correctly argues that inertia, path dependence, and complacency - driven by a lack of anticipation - are critically dangerous to any company, particularly the more established ones.

I strongly advocate for this book and implore anyone in risk management and business strategy to read it. The content of the book probably isn’t what you’ll discuss at an AGM or company retreat, which is all the more reason to read it. If you don’t seek out the type of work Spitz is communicating, the old guard of many modern companies likely won’t teach it to you. That’s what makes this book so important.

Many companies find themselves in a commercial and strategic “fog of war.” This is often a product of long-term complacency. Interestingly, Carl von Clausewitz also argued that “it is even better to act quickly and err than to hesitate until the time of action is past.”

In other words, don’t get complacent. A good start is to read Disrupt with Impact by Roger Spitz.