The psychology of Disruptive Innovation

This post originally appeared on the Christensen Institute’s blog and is reposted here with permission.

Key points:

In the early 2000s, Netflix co-founders Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph found themselves in a meeting that could have dramatically altered the trajectory of their fledgling company. Following the dot-com crash, Netflix was struggling to gain traction as a DVD-rental-by-mail service. Desperate for a lifeline, Hastings and Randolph managed to secure a meeting with John Antioco, the CEO of Blockbuster, in hopes of forming a partnership that would combine their online rental service with Blockbuster’s vast network of physical stores.

Hastings passionately pitched the idea, proposing that Netflix would handle the online side of the business while Blockbuster focused on the stores. He envisioned a synergy that would make the combined company a dominant force in the industry. However, Antioco was unimpressed. He dismissed Netflix as a “very small niche business” and confidently declared that “the dot-com hysteria is completely overblown.”

This moment illustrates a common pattern for disruptive innovation. New business models that rethink fundamental technologies, processes, and success metrics of an industry often fail to resonate with the established players in that industry. When Apple and others launched the first personal computers, indomitable incumbents like Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) couldn’t see the sense in selling cheap, inferior computers to consumers who had shown no need for computers before. Likewise, taxi companies didn’t get serious about ride-hailing apps until after Uber and Lyft revealed the demand for that kind of convenience; and taxis were never going to see the sense in ride-sharing. 

As I’ve come to discover over the last few months, this same pattern also holds true in education.

A tour of new insights on transforming education

During the early months of this year, I spoke at several conferences to share the insights from my research on how to create the conditions to disrupt conventional schooling and transform education. I also arranged meetings with foundation officers and nonprofit leaders whose work focuses on K–12 innovation. 

My primary aim was to try to persuade people who care about transforming conventional schooling that their opportunities for meaningful change are limited if they assume a starting point of working within existing conventional schools. At the same time, I wanted to offer a hopeful message: by seeking out the right circumstances, education leaders can create the conditions for new models of schooling to emerge, evolve, and eventually transform mainstream conventional education.

Potential in the eye of the beholder

The feedback on my presentations was a mixed bag.

Some people showed palpable enthusiasm for what I shared. This group tended to include leaders of schools like those I was highlighting—alternative schools, hybrid virtual schools, and microschools. For them, my presentation elevated their hopes and brought clarity to their challenges while providing language to describe their journeys. 

At the other end of the spectrum, a good number of people from foundations, nonprofits, and conventional school systems were politely skeptical of what I shared. They tended to dismiss emergent new models of schooling as just fringe experiments. Or they voiced concerns that these schools weren’t poised to deliver immediate improvements in equity or student achievement. Notably, many of these people also emphasized that because the vast majority of students today learn in conventional settings, their funding commitments and partnership priorities lay with conventional schools.

The path forward for disruptive innovation in education

Just as John Antioco was skeptical of Netflix’s early business model, I came to see that the people working to improve conventional schools are unlikely to see the merit in emergent new models of schooling. 

In fairness, their skepticism could be well placed. Right now, no one knows for sure whether today’s microschools, hybrid virtual schools, and alternative schools will pan out. Some could become soaring successes that transform the field a la Netflix. But they could just as well turn out to be niche solutions enjoying their moment in the limelight (e.g., Mapquest.com) or shooting stars that shine for a moment and then burn up (e.g., Pets.com). Only time will tell which ideas have truly disruptive potential.

Nonetheless, the fact that many people today don’t believe new models of schooling will succeed doesn’t mean they won’t. Anyone working to improve existing schools carries a cognitive bias that shapes where they see potential. In their eyes, new models don’t follow “best practices,” don’t measure up to conventional quality metrics, and don’t follow the innovation patterns that veteran leaders recognize.

But this isn’t because new models fail to deliver value to the people they aim to serve. Rather, it’s because the established value networks that most people have been swimming in shape how they see the world. Or to put it bluntly in the words of Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary [or funding or ideological commitments] depends upon his not understanding it.”

The path forward

So, here’s my advice for people working to build new models of schooling: don’t spend time trying to convince the skeptics. Your success isn’t going to hinge on advocacy and movement building. Instead, your time and effort will be better spent continuing to refine your new model of schooling outside the purview of the mainstream players and building new bodies of evidence to demonstrate the impact and success of your model. 

When Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph couldn’t get John Antioco’s buy-in, they didn’t double down on trying to convince him that Netflix had potential. They moved ahead without him. Likewise, the people developing new models of schooling shouldn’t exhaust themselves trying to get popular buy-in for their ideas. Rather, they should keep building with the people who understand what they’re trying to do.

When substantial numbers of students, families, and educators start migrating to new models of schooling, that’s when the skeptical thought leaders will get onboard. Until then, focus on building and evolving today’s early-stage models into the kinds of programs that mainstream students and families won’t want to miss out on.