In my last interview with Clay Christensen, who died last month, he said his theory of “disruptive innovation” had provided a “common language” that allowed businesses to frame a problem and decide on a course of action.
It was a typically modest self-assessment. It also provided a clue to the way in which some disruption zealots were able to twist the management thinker’s ideas into a dangerous cult. The theory had had an impact, Christensen said, “largely for good, but sometimes for idiocy”.
Niklas Zennstrom, who co-founded Skype, told me recently how the early assumption that web-based innovations would mostly benefit the world, was “used as a blanket excuse for doing whatever”. The relatively small scale of the network in the 1990s tended to limit the damage caused by any misguided early experiments or morally dubious business models.
Today, though, “everything is connected and when things go wrong, they go wrong in a massive way”. Idiocy, and worse, can be amplified to dangerous effect.
The clearest recent case study in reckless scaling is Uber. The transportation platform grew so rapidly, on an aggressive “always be hustlin’” template, that it neglected basic policies until it was hit by a slew of accusations in 2017, from ignoring sexual harassment complaints to duping regulators.
Unsurprisingly, the overused trope of start-ups promising to become “the Uber for” their sector, from laundry to marijuana, has died away in the meantime. The risk-hungry attitude of entrepreneurs has not — thank goodness. But fast-growing companies are still prone to stampede across the line between innovations that make customers’ lives easier and those that creep them out. This is despite research suggesting the mere knowledge that marketers are tracking your personal data could spook buyers.
When I first wrote about the “creepiness quotient” of products in 2015, Google had recently suspended sales of Google Glass, its augmented reality eyewear, amid fears about privacy. If anything, the line is now even more tightly drawn. Consider recent concerns about Clearview AI’s facial recognition app. It allows users to identify strangers by matching their photos against images scraped from online profiles. “You can’t ban technology,” said one investor in the New York Times report on how law enforcers were using the app. “Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it.”
You can, however, prepare to avoid dystopia. Atomico, Mr Zennström’s venture capital fund, is now running a workshop it calls “conscious scaling” for founders of the technology companies it backs and for its investment partners. The aim is to make young companies aware of the societal benefits and pitfalls of their ideas in advance.
Founders are asked how their success will change the world for the better. But they are also encouraged to imagine their product, service or technology in 10 years at the centre of an episode of the television series Black Mirror, which envisages a dark future, often by extrapolating from today’s new technologies and changing social habits. In one recent episode, for instance, swarms of bee-sized drones are repurposed with facial recognition technology to attack and kill people. As your company scales up, Atomico’s workshop asks, “Who are the potential losers? How might parts of society be worse off? What could be the unforeseen second and third order consequences of your success?”
In some respects, this is a brave initiative. Some would say it is naive and foolhardy. Founders who pause before pressing ahead with groundbreaking innovation know they may be overtaken by more aggressive rivals. The temptation to storm forward and tweak your principles later is strong.
Atomico believes, though, that it is catching a wave of purposeful tech: its recent report on the state of the European industry says only 14 per cent of founders do not believe assessing societal or environmental impact is relevant. Start-ups also worry at least as much as big companies about how to lure and keep talented and idealistic staff.
More important, though, is that the past five years have underlined the vast cost — in time, energy and credibility — of reversing ethical mis-steps once a company has reached global scale. Better to establish strong values early. “These are decisions that in the short term seem very small and incremental,” says Mr Zennstrom, “but you’re drawing a line in the sand and that can create so much clarity.”
Christensen put this another way, in his book How Will You Measure Your Life?: “It’s easier to hold your principles 100 per cent of the time than it is to hold them 98 per cent of the time.”
Twitter: @andrewtghill