Disability Futures

If struggling with a target has limitations as a change strategy, what else can we do?

We can replace the whole darn system!

Disruptive Innovation is a way to replace an entire system.

The framework was originally developed by Clay Christensen to explain how newcomers in an industry could successfully replace mature and very successful corporations.

These successful corporations develop themselves by creating "sustaining" innovations, ones that support their previous successes, using their money and expertise to grow. Eventually, sustaining innovations create a product that has many features of no or even negative importance to their customers. The customers are tied in to the product line by their past choices, and learn to live with what they don't want for what they want. Additionally, the cost and complexity of the product tends to rise over time as a direct result of these sustaining innovations, and a market grows that would like the some parts of the product, but not the cost and complexity. The corporation doesn't address these concerns because of the money they are making and the relationships they have with their best customers.

A "disruptive" innovation partially breaks down the stability of the mature industry. Typically, the product created through this kind of innovation is far cheaper, and does not have the complexity of the mature product. It also tends to target a market ignored by the mature industry. If the disruptive innovation succeeds in tapping a market, it establishes a financial and technical base for improvements. It becomes good at the product it is making.

This process takes away part of the market for the mature industry. This first market is often one the mature industry doesn't consider a profitable market, or one that the mature industry considers a weak market compared with their mature industry customers.

The newcomer, now having a stable financial and customer base, chooses a new market to target for its disruptive strategy. Again, this will be a market that the mature industry has little or no interest in, but that is "upmarket" from the original target for disruption.

And so on. Until the entire industry is replaced by the disruptive newcomers.

Next: A Disruptive Example

There are a lot of problems with using Coevolution as our central method of changing a system:

• While we may have energy, flexibility, and rapidness of response in the early phases of a coevolutionary competition, the other system typically has far more money and an inherently deep inertia. In the long run, we are likely to run out of juice before the other side does. Thus, we settle for what we can get, and go on to another coevolutionary change strategy or phase in the game.
• Since our targets for change typically want certainty in their future, they will settle with us in ways that reduce uncertainty-typically a clearer (more rigid) definition of some part of the game's defining characteristics. When we settle for less than what we would like, and they settle for something that is more predictable, the system we are trying to change becomes more and more rigid. Look at how special education law has solidified over the decades in ways that have not met the possibilities we all envisioned "back in the day".
• Once a target system is rigid, "our" side becomes a fractured set of seperate communities who will be unwilling to give up progress in their interests in order to achieve progress in some other set of interests. This fracturing is most obvious when the target system attempts to implement cutbacks. We can only stand against all cuts, even though some cuts will eventually be made, because we would have no "push" otherwise.
• We do not have the resources to directly push for the kind of ultimate full system change we want. Even if we push hard in one part of our change agenda, we are likely to run out of resources before the other system does. So we settle in some way or another in order to get a decent outcome now, and preserve our ability to continue the fight, operating on the assumption that we have created a new plateau for the struggle.
• As can be seen over the last half-century, the political basis of change shifts. We now live in a time when much of our success (and our methods of change) will be undercut by reduced funding over the long term. Any change in overall resources for the two parties to the game changes the basic dynamic of coevolution.

While coevolutionary change strategies have allowed up to create change in the legal infrastructure of our rights and possibilities, I believe that the effectiveness of those strategies is fading. We are getting less and less for more and more effort. We need to think about systems change using a new framework.

Next: What is Disruptive Innovation as a Change Strategy?

What Is Coevolution?

When the disability community tries to change a system, we almost always use some kind of Coevolutionary Strategy. Think of the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. One side would make a move, the other would respond. Back and forth the two governments would go. Advocacy change strategies and political change strategies are largely coevolutionary. 

Coevolution is also described as the "Red Queen" effect, from Alice in Wonderland. In Coevolution, as sometimes in Wonderland, you have to run faster and faster just to keep up.

Generally, systems engaged in coevolution become better and better at their "side" of the competition, and they tend to become more complex over time. Eventually, Coevolution slows and stops when one party reaches some resource limit. The Soviet Union ran out of money for the fight, and collapsed.

Predator-Prey relationships have a coevolutionary element. So do ongoing competitions of all types. You can think of Coevolution as a game. Each side tries through its responses to win the current phase of the game. Note, importantly, that it is not enough to win one phase of the game. Both the side that wins and the side that loses a phase must be able to play another "game" or Coevolution ends.

Next: Problems with Using a Coevolutionary Strategy

Anyone who has written a Federal or State grant of any size has had to deal with the not well defined geographic realities of explaining where your marvelous project will have impact. A favorite ambiguity of mine has been how to define counties in Michigan as either urban or rural. After all, every Michigan county has cities. At the same time there are some sort of clear differences between Detroit and Houghton. (For example, Houghton doesn't have a cop show named after it.)

Well, I ran across a solution from the Office of Management and Budget a few days ago, and thought I would pass on this illumination to all of you.

They have divided Michigan counties into three categories:

• Rural: Anything not defined under the other two categories. Rural is the throw-away category.
• Micropolitan: Contains at least one urbanized cluster of a least 10,000, but not more than 50,000, population, and an adjacent territory that has a high degree of economic integration with the core, as measured by commuting ties.
• Metropolitan: At least one urbanized area with at least 50,000 population, and an adjacent territory that has a high degree of economic integration with the core, as measured by commuting ties.

All clear, now?

In a recession like ours, I think economic integration is more of a hope than a reality.

Commuting is becoming a thing of the past.

Does this expansion of geographic reality also lead us to the cultural concept of microsexual?