Part two: DISRUPT (Converge)

Few organisations run their own data centres today, as computing is a cost of doing business, not a source of competitive advantage (which cloud provider does your smartphone use? Do you even care?). We create advantage by building the new on top of sub-components that were once a thing of wonder but are now reliable, efficient platforms that reduce the cost of exploration.

Once we’ve determined the underlying systems we should build on top of, the question becomes: which new value-creating activities should we develop? Which higher-order systems will disrupt the old ways of working — as ride-hailing apps did to taxis, or e-comm did to physical retail?

There are two routes to disruption:

1. Identify unmet user needs — or underserved markets.
2. Identify constraints in the value chain — preventing us from satisfying existing user needs better.

I. Unmet User Needs

Users are not just customers who buy from you, but the others they buy for as well. Taking the user perspective helps identify anything missing from their lives. If we satisfy that, users will turn to us, as no rival offerings exist. This gives us time and the feedback we need to become better.

Unmet needs sit top left on a map — high in potential value, but also uncertainty (novel practices). To reduce the cost and risk of exploration, we build the new on top of efficient platforms (bottom right) — launching multiple, safe-to-fail bets to learn what works, then amplify what gets traction.

II. Overcoming Constraints

The second route to disruption is overcoming constraints in current value chains. For example, Amazon created cloud computing to stop internal teams continually rebuilding the same systems, and “it became immediately obvious that every company in the world was going to want this.”

The WEF explains how overcoming constraints for EV batteries disrupted other industries as well:

“Battery performance was historically constrained by the use of heavy materials and inefficient chemistries. That bottleneck was relieved when advances in lightweight materials combined with improved battery chemistry, making lithium‑ion batteries practical. This shift unlocked an explosion of innovation in small devices, from smartphones to wearables, because designers could suddenly rely on compact energy-dense power sources that enabled new product categories.”

Let’s see how one company turned a constraint into a new multi-million dollar product.

Our client ran the sales centres of a Fortune 500 company in multiple countries, which were struggling with sluggish sales. A small team from the business and IT sides mapped out a typical sales centre — giving them the shared language they needed to discuss what might be wrong. It didn’t take them long to identify the main constraint: the ‘ERP interface’.

The ‘ERP interface’ connected the ‘Inventory Management System’ to the ‘ERP d-base’. It was a necessary, but expensive and cumbersome piece of technology. Training staff to use it took up 80% of onboarding time and, even then, it took 15 mins to process a standard order, with customers often baulking if there was even a small queue at the sales centre — negatively impacting sales. This was a problem being replicated thousands of times across the Fortune 500 company’s global operations.

The business side saw this as an IT problem, but IT felt constrained by an ERP system that had to be used. With the map as a common language, they could ask questions and challenge assumptions. After 30 minutes of discussion, someone suggested using a self-service ordering screen as a work-around to the ERP interface. At first the IT side resisted this. But together with the business side they mapped out the ‘technical and operational’ components needed and saw that it was feasible.

Within weeks they had a minimum viable product, which they piloted in their smallest sales centre. Over several months it exceeded every KPI: quicker throughput times, increased sales, less staff training, higher employee and customer satisfaction. They licensed their solution (at a lower cost than the ‘ERP interface’) to the Fortune 500 company, who rolled it out globally. This new product today earns our client millions in annual recurring revenues.

A simple, elegant — even obvious — solution, once they had a map.

In Clayton Christensen's classic definition, disruptive innovation is not a better product but a simpler, cheaper one that satisfies the unmet needs of users.

A Wardley Map enables us to identify the constraints and challenge the assumptions holding us back. This triggers insights — sudden and unexpected shifts to better stories — into the new, value-creating activities we should develop next.

We explore next how to put such insights into action.