According to PC Magazine, “Disruptive Technology” is ” A new technology  that has a serious impact on the status quo and changes the way people have been dealing with something, perhaps for decades.”

For example, the cd disrupted the previous technology of records and more recently, the I-Pod disrupted not only CD’s but the way in which we purchase our music!

But long before  disruptive technology there was the Disruptive Thinker!

This is that bold individual who had the guts to challenge the status quo. This is the one who knew in their heart that there had to be a better way.

For example, some disruptive thinker at UPS realized that every time their trucks sat at a red light or stop sign, they were burning money. Multiply that by their fleet of more than 95,000 trucks and you’re burning truckloads of money. Literally! As a result of this disruptive thinker, other disruptive thinkers joined in and they now employ a “package flow” software which amongst other things, maps out the most efficient routes with the least amount of left turns. In the first year alone, 28.5 million miles and 3 million gallons of gas were saved.

Gold star disruptive thinker . . . but I’m getting way ahead of things. Let’s go back a bit.

Before the “disruptive thinker” there is the “creative thinker”.  Before that, there’s a lost art called “thinking”. It seems we are all so busy moving, multitasking, responding, getting interrupted, doing the work of more than one person that we stay in reaction mode most of the day! No time to think when we’re busy responding!

So, how can we get our organizations back to “thinking” and moving towards “disruptive thinking”?

1)    Hire “Thinkers”: Don’t ditch your hiring process (unless its lame) just add “thinking” to your list of “must haves”. There are numerous ways you can check for this. When I interview candidates (doesn’t matter if its sales, leadership or office staff) I will ask them to “Tell me about a time when you had to embrace a creative approach to achieve your objective” I love it when someone tells me about a challenge and they had to think outside the box. Isn’t that what their day to day is going to look like anyway?  I’m not holding out for a creative genius, but I am looking for someone who can point to at least one time, when they had to think and get creative. Another thing you can do (and this was inspired by Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers) is have your candidate take out a sheet of paper and have them take a divergence test by writing down as many different uses for  a) a brink  b) a blanket . How cool would it be if you could “get inside” a candidates head” before they’re on your payroll? I mean dude, there’s a huge difference between someone answering with “to build a wall and to keep warm” vs someone else who is clearly the next “MacGyver”!

2)    Stop Discouraging Everyone From Thinking! Believe it or not, disruptive thinkers aren’t encouraged as much as they should be in corporate America. I remember attending a meeting with some very successful leaders a few years ago. One of these young leaders got up and told the CEO how he encouraged his team to think outside the box and made innovation the goal of every employee. The CEO looked at the young leader and replied “I hope they aren’t doing that on company time!” Along the same lines is when a leader immediately shuts down in response to an idea and defaults to “We’ve always done it this way” or the leader who feels that their ego is threatened by someone’s great idea.  Oh and leaders, here’s something cool for you to start doing. Don’t let your employees complain to you without bringing you an idea or an offer to brainstorm solutions with you.

3)    Be Ready For Creativity To Come A Knockin: Sir Richard Branson talks about how ideas will come to his team while partying at a club, Steve Jobs has mentioned how employees will stop each other in the hallway to bounce ideas around and ideas even have this crazy way of showing their faces when we are receiving complaints from clients. Are you ready to receive them or are you of the mindset that creativity can be scheduled for 3:15 on Thursdays? Companies need to encourage the spontaneity of ideas and remove barriers in order for employees to be heard. On an individual basis, you and I have to be ready for ideas to show up, unannounced. For that reason I carry both a digital voice recorder and my trusty journal. For ideas on how you can keep a journal click here I never leave the scene of an idea without jotting it down. Too many other things going on in my world to quickly distract me from my own genius 🙂

4)    Study Disruptive Thinkers: Study people like Steve Jobs, Sir Richard Branson, Seth Godin and Fred Smith to name just a few. But don’t stop there, look around you in your world. Who’s shaking things up at your job, your industry, etc? Get inside their head, talk with them, study them, learn their ways! Can’t find them in your space? Just follow the trail of ridicule and naysayers!

5)    Study Thinking: There are volumes of books available on this subject. 3 quick recommendations: Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko.  How To Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci by Michael Gelb and How Successful People Think by John C Maxwell. I’m currently reading Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky but I don’t like to recommend a book I haven’t read in its entirety.

6)    Take Time To Think: And it can’t be while the battle is being fought. It has to be time when the phones aren’t ringing and people barging. For me, its been Sunday mornings with a piping hot cup of coffee for the last 15 years. More on that here:

7)    Cultivate Your Creativity: One of the best guitar teachers I ever studied with made me do an exercise where I had to express, through music the color blue. I thought the dude was on LSD but he was dead serious and it stretched me, turned me inside out, moved me out of my comfort zone, frustrated me, annoyed me and made me a much better musician. I’m not suggesting you do the same. I can just see the random drug test invitations hitting the inboxes now. I’m suggesting that you start cultivating creativity on your teams. It can be things like having everyone bring 3 creative door openers to the next sales meeting, stretching ourselves to not only have one elevator speech, how about one that’s geared to a certain vertical and another one that’s humorous? How about challenging yourself to come up with at least 1 idea for your client’s business? Talk about competitor proofing a relationship!  I’ve even encouraged my teammates to keep journals and share journal entries with the team. Oh, if you want to get some really cool “that’s an awesome idea” vibes going, consider getting out of the office! It doesn’t have to be some fancy  executive retreat. It can be a trip to the local park, the Diner or the patio at your house. You’d be surprised what happens to our barriers once we remove them!

8)    Surround Yourself With Thinkers: Don’t have them at work? Not in a position to change that? How about a Mastermind Group? How about brainstorming ideas with your Linkedin Group. Don’t like your Linkedin group? Why not invent your own like I did? Even if you have the greatest internal thinkers on the planet, it never hurts to have external sounding boards.

9)    Get Suspicious About Everything! When I say “suspicious” I mean, looking at things like there is a better way but you just haven’t found it yet. Suspicious as in something  missing from that surefire idea or new product you are about to launch. Suspicious as in asking “What are we missing?” and then having the guts to listen and the leadership to ACT!

And this all begins with one brave soul having the guts to engage in disruptive thinking and then disrupting the thoughts of others!

Stop judging your thoughts and start disrupting . . . our world needs you!

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