FACT: Whirlpool’s innovation pipeline has improved from $10m in 2005 to $760m in 2009 to over $4.5B current day (measured by the performance of new products launched over the previous 3 years)

If Whirlpool can do this then, so can any organization. They did this, not through launching an i-Pod, but by systematically looking at all areas of its business and encouraging disruption from ‘everyone, everywhere, everyday’. It is our observation that organizations believe that disruption begins and ends with product ideas.

For disruption to have payoff – for it to generate sustainable organic sales and profit growth – it must be integrated into how you run your entire business. We think ideas are not the problem; it is the inherent ‘blockers’ that organizations unwittingly place in front of employees day in and day out. It is now time to move from the rhetoric to reality!

A car is more than its engine. Mate a 500 HP engine with a set of nearly bald tires and most of that power will get wasted. Again, the same is true for disruption. No matter how laudable a company’s disruption practices are, if its entire management model hasn’t been tuned for disruption, little of the engine’s power will reach the bottom line.

If, for example, a company’s budgeting process is inherently conservative and makes it difficult for first-line employees to get funding for small-scale experiments, any investment in disruption skills will be wasted. If its product development process places too much emphasis on removing risk from new launches, few new-to-the-world products will make it to market. If its assessment and compensation system doesn’t reward disruption performance, it will end up with managers who are more bean counters than trailblazers. If it lacks a financial reporting system that tracks disruption investment and staffing, no alarm bells will ring when an innovation project gets sacrificed on the altar of quarterly earnings.

It is hardly surprising that disruption has become the new mantra of CEO’s everywhere. In our suddenly sober world, there are few alternatives to disruption. To get a depth of understanding and provide you insights into the disruption capabilities of your organization we have looked at the eight enablers of disruptive performance.

Whilst these enablers highlight the opportunities it will not transport the growth. It is the people who will do that through embarking on disruption for everyone and everywhere. The real and long-term capability is reached only when this core competency becomes a part of the DNA of the organization.

In conjunction with OPIC (a pioneering Organizational Psychologist Consultancy) we have teamed up to develop InnoAudit, which will help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your organization when it comes to disruption. We consider it our job to stay on top of and dissect all of the latest research that is being conducted into disruption, and translate it into practical advice and strategies for organizations that want to grow. Our work is based on decades of practical organizational & leadership work & research from institutions such as Harvard University, Stanford University, London Business School and others, identifying the critical attributes that contribute to disruptive performance.

If you are serious about improving your organization’s ability to grow through disruption, then we would be super excited to help you with what can be a tough but incredibly rewarding journey.

The first place to start is to understand what’s currently working and what’s not.

InnoAudit is designed to do just that – tell you what you need to keep doing and what you need to change in order to ramp up your innovation performance. And if you already know what’s working and what’s not, we can help educate you on best practice by deep diving into the eight key areas and guiding you through applying these in your organization.