Present day capitalism assumes that the moving force of the economic system is the access to energy resources and the possession of the same resources. Everything else is discounted to favour energy. For a long time, market sentiment agreed, and Exxon was the company with the largest market cap. This is not today's reality anymore. Apple Corporation has the largest market cap, and everyone seems at times confused as to why. Breakthrough capitalism has already happened! Apple, Google (with YouTube combined) and Facebook, just the three of them, have redefined what capitalism is all about. Some are focusing on the wrong things when looking for the constant of a business enterprise, and not the variable. The variable is behavior. And in this new context, to 'be-have' means to have in order to be, and in order to become.

Human life revolves around the tangibles that we have created as well as the one we have inherited. The tangibles of our manifest presence form the culture of our civilizations; they are both a burden and a purpose, as humans are destined to create and to maintain civilizations in order to survive. In the course of our history we have created Tools, Shells and Networks, each of them as a reflection of the technological accomplishments of the times in which they were produced, as well as of the dreams of the people that created them. All summed up in the Settlements that contain our organized and purposeful social groups.

Human life expressed as civilization is the reflection of the Tools available and the sum of the Shells, Networks and Settlements these tools have allowed us to build. We are both constrained and expanded by our Tools. Tools defineNetworks and Settlements. In the past, these Networks were in close proximity, as were Settlements, due to practical reasons like natural resource availability – water – effort conservation, and so on. With the advent of the digital Network, digital data as a material and the tools it creates allows for the creation of Settlements unbound by physical proximity, bound only by social identity, scope and preferences.

It all starts with learning a new language – the language of ideas – and with establishing frameworks of possibility in the ideology of the enterprise. Value creation is the expansion of relationships enabled by a disruptor media and the creation of new behaviors as a result. This opens two needed capabilities for a business: The first is upstream, creating the platform services people want to engage with. The second is downstream: marketing, distributing and selling these platforms as services. By the nature of the activities involved, the upstream and downstream capabilities are quite different in scope, inputs and outputs. The downstream calls for methodology – what do we have to do and how? - while the upstream calls for ideology - why and for whom are we doing this? In the context of enterprise, ideology is a way of being, behaving and influencing the world. An attitude. A mindset.

Starting from scratch means wiping the slate clean of any past structures and imagining how the ingredients we have at our disposal, can frame a new type of society, in which people's desires, wants and needs are being satisfied in new ways. In building such an organization or service from scratch we can retain some of the values of the present, but not the physical infrastructure. Starting from scratch is a challenge to one's ability to create new images of self, constructing a new world from the inside out, as both a participant as well as a creature of it. These new images, and the artifacts they create in turn, are reflections of new life priorities, and the heights of existence we want to achieve through the new story. A new, and inspiring ethos.

For the context of this book, a disruption occurs when human motivation embraces new technology and allows it to enhance and expand the experience of everyday life. In this definition, the disruptor is the technology, while disruption is the human being engaged in a new behaviour. People's acceptance and appropriation of new technologies creates a business disruption, which changes, interrupts, transitions, and eventually transforms people's habitual way of doing things. This book provides a structural understanding of how disruption is so different from regular change and offers methods for conceptualizing beneficial responses into products, services, or experiences.

Disruption studies are distinct from other research fields such as technological innovation because disruption is a category of knowledge, as argued in this book. A philosopher seeks knowledge, and knowledge is essential for understanding disruption. Knowledge about disruption is not about knowing what happens but more about how it happens. The core challenge of disruption is the essential questions we need to ask in every situation and why we need to ask them. When looking at disruption from a philosophical perspective, we can begin to formulate a set of testable principles of disruption.

Two critical phases are described in this book to prepare for rapid responses to disruptors that lead to societal disruptions: the first is the transition phase, the immediate changes brought about by a radical new idea fundamentally altering our relationships. The second is the transformative change phase- using that radical new idea to establish and sustain an entirely new organization or system.

By investigating and describing these transitions and transformations, this book provides a framework for measuring, planning, and changing how organizations are run and the activity they support and provides processes for understanding and translating conceptualization into action.


EXCERPT from Chapter 1.1 Understanding Disruption

THE GREAT DISRUPTOR

When the disruptor is a technology - as opposed to a natural event - the disruption is not. The disruption is always manifesting at the behavioural level of everyday life, culture, and society, transforming how people accomplish tasks and fundamentally challenging the very structures upon which economic activity is based. These include:

• Interactions of various non-economic cultural variables form every human culture.
  
• The disruption in a relationship that occurs when one non-economic cultural variable is disrupted and replaced with another non-economic variable by technological means.
  
• Or when the disruption is the basis of the change in behaviour.
  
  Let us take technology seriously as a disruptor. We must also take it seriously as a disruption because of its power to alter how we relate to nature and ourselves. The great disruptor, which shifts the paradigm of human existence, is technology-aided or modified behavior. Why does this matter?
  
  Technology is the amorphous entity that is present everywhere around us. It is all around us informing and continuously transforming a new human condition, and now has an increasingly profound effect on our changing relationship to nature. Technology makes a deep-seated impact on how our perception of nature is transformed by the expanding technologies that interconnect humanity and nature, enabling us to achieve seemingly impossible feats.
  
  Our perspective of nature has changed, and we are only just starting to come to grips with the implications of this transformation. This shifts how we manage land, labour, and the services required to run the planet's machinery. Without technology, in a hierarchical, more highly defined sense, we would have been living a different life altogether than the one we have today. It would have been a life driven entirely by nature and not the quirks of human will. If we did not build the authority to do this – to modify nature as much as possible and conform it to our will - we would not exist. In Ancient Greek mythology, Gaia was the woman in charge of the Earth. While today we understand Gaia to be the collective identity of all life on Earth, in a society steeped in traditional thought, Gaia was indeed the soul of the human world.
  
  Our entire idea of nature's omnipotence was seemingly based upon this relationship to nature. From the beginning of time, we knew that the elements of Earth – its soil, mountains, rivers, clouds, starry skies, and the weather – formed the basis of all that life on Earth contained. We also knew that this material world was interwoven with many invisible realms of nature beyond the grasp of human consciousness. This knowledge is no longer doubted. Instead, it is used to support radically different ideas of nature; technology has changed our understanding of nature from an inanimate, inert being into a living, dynamic entity. Our relationship to the environment has also changed because of this awareness of nature as living, integral and interconnected. Humans no longer see nature and ourselves as separate entities.
  
  The social domain of our lives is no longer based on a dichotomy between nature and humanity. Instead, it is shaped and influenced by a far more dynamic and alive relationship. Under this new paradigm of nature, the formal political and economic roles we have created for ourselves through human ingenuity and labour no longer serve us. We are now in the grip of a technology-generated oligarchy, in which it is us, and only us, who rule the planet, and we need to learn to see this new world of interdependence in the same way we see our great aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. The new knowledge that nature and all life are integral to each other, while at the same time, unique and non-distinct, is not something that can be assimilated and controlled with technology alone. We need understanding and a new or possibly renewed philosophy of life, one that integrates any upcoming disruptors with joy and competence by understanding the permanence of disruption as we understand water or the wind.
  
  This transformation requires humility, willingness to change, listening skills, empathy, creativity, open-mindedness, and constant learning.
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Emerald Publishing Limited. Hardcover. 252 pages. 152 x 229mm. Release date: July 28, 2022