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<user_memory_store></user_memory_store> When someone tells me “disruption” and I don’t reach for the kettle first, you know the conversation’s getting properly interesting. Disruptive thinking is not a boardroom buzzword you sprinkle over strategy decks to make them smell modern. It’s a set of habits, a small ars poetica for professionals who intend to survive—and shape—the next decade. The difference between steady improvement and genuinely transformative work often comes down to a handful of teachable behaviours: curiosity, synthesis, a tolerance for failure, and the stubbornness to keep iterating when others give up. After fifteen years of advising boards, running workshops in Sydney and Melbourne, and watching teams either fizzle or flourish, I’ll say something slightly unpopular: universities and traditional training alone will not produce the kind of thinkers we need. Real disruptive thought is forged in messy, cross-disciplinary practice. Why bother? Because the economy rewards the organisations that don’t just respond to change, but create it. The World Economic Forum estimates that by 2027 a large share of workers will need significant reskilling to remain relevant—this is not abstract; it is a call to action for learning design, leadership and talent strategy. If you’re building teams to operate in that world, you want people who can hear complexity and say, “Okay. Now what if we did the opposite?” What disruptive thinking actually looks like A disruptive thinker isn’t necessarily the loudest person in the room. Often they are the person who asks the inconvenient question, reframes the brief, or points out where an assumption is hiding. They synthesise fragments—customer anecdotes, data anomalies, offhand comments in a user interview—and build something new from them. Two things stand out from the best examples I’ve seen in practice: - They tolerate ambiguity. Not in a breezy, “we’re fine” kind of way, but as a deliberate stance: uncertainty is information, not a defect. - They treat failure as feedback. Not a nice platitude. Actual, rigorous analysis of what failed, why, and how to pivot. If you want people like that, you can’t train them with slide decks and 9-to-5 lectures. You cultivate environments that reward experimentation, normalise small failures, and create rituals for rapid learning cycles. Curiosity and disciplined questioning Curiosity is the grain of sand that becomes the pearl—if you cultivate it. Too often organisations confuse curiosity with unfocused tinkering. The trick is disciplined inquiry: open-ended questions paired with constraints. Ask “what if we removed the product feature everyone says is essential?”—then limit the experiment to a week and a small customer segment. That’s curiosity with muscle. We do this in workshops by teaching teams how to ask better questions—questions that probe assumptions, reveal hidden trade-offs, and surface the smallest testable hypothesis. Good questions are not neutral; they direct attention. When clients come to us worried about “culture,” we rarely start with policies. We start with questions: who gets rewarded for trying something risky? Who’s allowed to fail, and how do they report it? Changing the questions changes the answers. Challenging assumptions (and your own biases) Assumptions live in the walls of organisations. They’re invisible until you run into them—then they’re immovable. Disruptive thinking requires an active practice of assumption-spotting. Use tools like premortems, devil’s advocacy, or simple red-team exercises to force the team to articulate what it’s taking for granted. The exercise is humbling. It’s also effective. I’ll state something that some HR managers will not like: diversity of thought trumps uniform expertise. A room full of specialists who all look and think the same will optimise existing solutions. A mixed room—different ages, backgrounds, cognitive styles—will interrogate the brief and invent alternatives. That’s not to say technical depth is irrelevant. It’s to say that cognitive diversity significantly raises the chance of a breakout idea. Creative problem-solving: technique meets temperament People imagine creativity happens in a flash of genius. Mostly it’s process. I encourage teams to use a toolbox of structured, divergent techniques—brainwriting, analogy mapping, provocation prompts—followed by ruthless convergence: quick prototypes, fast feedback, measurable metrics. Design thinking is useful here, but don’t fetishise the terminology. Empathy, prototyping, and iterative testing will beat a perfect five-stage model every time when reality bites. There’s a point where temperament matters: resilience. Creative efforts are often non-linear and often bruising. We teach resilience as a practical skill: how to run a post-mortem that extracts learning without scapegoating, how to protect psychological safety while still pushing for accountable delivery. This is where leadership matters. Leaders who model curiosity, admit their own mistakes, and allocate ‘failure budgets’ (yes, I said budget—fund small bets and accept the cost of those that don’t land) create the conditions for others to take similar risks. Design thinking, lateral leaps and making the strange familiar Design thinking—properly practised—helps teams centre human needs while experimenting rapidly. It’s deceptively simple: empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test. The power is in the constraints and the human-centred lens. Lateral thinking, on the other hand, is the cognitive gymnastics that generates the odd pairings. Bring them together and you get ideas that are human-first and structurally novel. A small example from a recent session: a retail client came with a brief about optimisation. We reframed the problem as “how do we make the store experience less stressful for older customers?” The team prototype wasn’t a complex technology stack; it was a modified store layout, a two-minute service touchpoint, and an assisted checkout pilot. Within weeks the pilot improved dwell time and net promoter scores in that cohort. Not every experiment needs a million-dollar budget. Often it needs a culture that notices the small friction points and the courage to try simple remedies. Failure, iteration and the ruthless kindness of feedback If you only take one thing from this, let it be this: failure is not a moral stain; it is a data point. But only if you treat it like one. Many organisations think “fail fast” means “fail and forget.” That’s lazy. Failing fast must be paired with capturing the data, assigning learning outcomes, and integrating that knowledge into the next cycle. We ask teams to codify their experiments: hypothesis, metric, outcome, and the single insight they’ll carry forward. That turns messy failure into repeatable learning. It also helps senior leaders see ROI on experimentation because the narrative is measurable. Education and institutional blockers Traditional education systems are, frankly, designed for predictable outcomes. Standardised tests and linear curricula reward convergent answers. That’s fine for basics. It’s terrible if your goal is to build people who thrive in chaotic, interconnected problems. That’s why I argue—controversially—that corporate training needs to complement formal education, not replicate it. We embed experiential learning into leadership programmes: simulations, cross-functional projects, and sponsored sabbaticals into different industries. Exposure matters. A finance manager who spends two weeks embedded with customer support will see problems—and opportunities—far differently. These are precisely the sorts of swaps that create synthesis. Organisational culture — the real lever Culture eats strategy for breakfast. You can design the best learning pathway, but if your appraisal system punishes failure and rewards visible compliance, nothing changes. Leaders must align structures with intent: reward curiosity, shift promotion criteria to include demonstrated learning, and create rituals that normalise experimentation (show-and-tell sessions, embedded retrospectives, public fail-forward stories). A practical tip: change your meeting rhythms. Replace one reporting meeting a month with a “learning showcase” where teams present what they tested and what they learned. Small changes like that signal different priorities. Two contentious but true opinions 1) Boards should fund failure. Put a line item in the budget for intentional experiments. Small bets, rapid learnings, capped losses. It’s fiscal discipline and courage combined. Many will say this is reckless. I say it’s prudent—if you’re serious about being a contender in five years. 2) Traditional lecture-based PD is overrated. People remember actions, not hours. Workshops should be followed by applied practice in the workplace—stretch assignments, coaching and manager follow-ups. If development isn’t embedded in work, it rarely influences behaviour. Leadership development: not a nice-to-have Leaders are the amplifiers of what works and the silencers of what doesn’t. If they’re not trained to model the behaviours of disruptive thinking—curiosity, humility, resilience—then investment in capability-building will leak out. We build leader cohorts that focus on unlearning: how to step back, how to empower teams, how to measure learning rather than just output. Leadership is less about knowing the answers and more about asking better questions. Putting it into practice: a few hands-on activities - Rapid prototyping sprints: 72-hour sprints with a clear hypothesis and a measurable customer outcome. - Cross-pollination secondments: temporary swaps across departments or partner organisations to build varied perspectives. - Structured post-mortems: one-page learning reviews that answer three questions—what happened; why did it happen; what we will do next. - Curiosity coaching: monthly peer coaching where participants bring a single “dumb” question and explore it deeply. We use these routinely. They’re not glamorous but they work. The payoff: long-term adaptability The point of all this isn’t to create a culture of chaos. It’s to create an organisation that can absorb shocks and leverage them into opportunities. When teams learn to reframe problems, test small, and scale what works, they don’t just respond to disruption—they lead it. That’s the difference between reactive and generative organisations. A small confession: I’d rather bet on a mediocre idea tested repeatedly than a perfect plan never executed. Execution and iteration matter more than a neat strategy on a slide. Some will disagree. Let them. Final, slightly blunt thought Teach people to think—not just to follow templates. Build rituals that make curiosity habitual. Fund small, accountable experiments. Train leaders to hold space for messy learning. It’s not glamorous. It’s not quick. But it works. We design our programmes with these principles at the core—because if you want disruptive thinking, you must build the scaffolding around it: practice, feedback, reward and time. Do it badly and you’ll create token projects. Do it well and you’ll create a machine that keeps reinventing itself. Sources & Notes - World Economic Forum. The Future of Jobs Report 2023. World Economic Forum; 2023. (Provides projections on workforce reskilling needs and changing skill demands.)