These individuals are often called disruptors or innovators. As businesses struggle to create success in their sectors that technological advances have disrupted, these people are now highly sought-after and rare.

The key difference between those who disrupt and those who are disrupted is their dependence on comfort.

It is often not the physical difficulty of doing something differently that holds us back from change but the emotional discomfort that goes along with it. This emotional discomfort stems from neurobiological, psychological and sociological factors.

Dealing with mental discomfort

The brain is designed to conserve energy as a survival mechanism. It does this by creating neural pathways that drive unconscious behaviour (habits) for tasks we perform on a regular basis. Any new task or activity requires a lot of effort, and the brain will, therefore, always try to revert to habits that are already formed.

“Only once we retrain ourselves and our workforces to become more comfortable with being uncomfortable will we be able to turn disruptive threats into opportunities for success.”

Doing something in a new way is uncomfortable because we feel tired a lot quicker. Humans are used to preparing for and dealing with cyclical change. This is much like being in sync with the seasons that come and go. People are not often exhausted by this kind of change because there are periods of stability within the change.

The nature of disruptive change differs from cyclical change; it is unpredictable and does not contain periods of stability.

Our personality types shape our dependence on stability: 75% of the world’s population prefers to operate in familiar environments and from skills they’ve already perfected.

Adapting to disruption

Disruptive advances require us to work in environments that have changed overnight. Understandably, most employees will have an adverse emotional reaction to the stability businesses have had to let go of to keep their doors open in a disrupted world.

Emotional reactions to change often include anger, fear and sadness. These emotions are not only driven by employees’ personality types but also by the culture of the business.

When the culture of a business – the way we do things around here – is highly resistant to change, even highly adaptable individuals become uncomfortable with doing things differently.

Groups – whether it be colleagues in the work environment, friends or family – set and manage their own boundaries by showing acceptance or rejection of the behaviour of individuals. If an individual’s behaviour threatens the group’s traditional way of doing things, the individual might soon experience that the group has rejected them.

The price of rejection

There is significant discomfort in being on the receiving end of rejection by a group. This discomfort often drives an individual to follow popular opinion rather than their own choice.

This interplay between acceptance and rejection manipulates how easily people in businesses adapt and stick to new ways of doing things. The discomfort of disruption drives businesses and individuals to continue seeking alternatives to change – such as denial, delay and undermining tactics – even though they know that the world as we knew it will never return.

Only once we retrain ourselves and our workforces to become more comfortable with being uncomfortable will we be able to turn disruptive threats into opportunities for success. My advice to businesses is to train their employees in the skills needed to accept change more quickly by understanding what the core purpose – not a job description – of their roles is. 

This understanding must be combined with knowledge of the major trend predictions for the future of their particular profession or sector and a replacement of industrial management habits with a design thinking mindset.

Juanita Vorster is a speaker and successful entrepreneur with a skill for making the complex simple. A Certified Director and Ethics Officer, Vorster runs an outsourced marketing business that has reported profitable growth every year since its inception.

Inc