John Geraci's Blog

I’m going to come clean: I’ve got an appetite for disruption.

And it seems to be growing.

Day by day I’m becoming ever more interested in the notion of disruption. Increasingly, I find myself looking for areas that are ripe for disruption, and within those areas, looking for the particular thing that could be the disrupting factor.

When I read news articles or blog posts or Tweets, I’m constantly evaluating the information along the lines of disruptive vs not disruptive.

It’s like I’m developing this tiny little disruption filter in my brain.

And on the other hand I’m less and less interested in plain old innovation. Even innovations that are ground breaking are less interesting to me these days, if they’re not disruptively ground breaking. If they don’t somehow challenge the status quo of their field while breaking ground.

I don’t know why this is. It’s just something that has grown in me over time.

Maybe it’s because, as I said in my last post, the web is not very disruptive anymore. Up until fairly recently, the web and disruption went hand in hand. If you were innovating on the web, chances were you were also disrupting something, even if you didn’t know you were. So in just thinking about the web, you were also thinking about disruption.

Now that’s no longer the case.

Increasingly, innovating on the web is like creating a better bumper for a Ford Explorer. And sure, Ford Explorers need better bumpers (they always do!), but that’s not what I got into the web for.

So I find that as the industry around me, my field of choice, becomes less and less of a game about changing the game, I become more and more attuned to the blips on the radar that are in fact game changing — or to the opportunities, as I see them, for changing games one way or another. Regardless of whether those opportunities are related to the web or not.

It’s kind of liberating in a way – I feel the disruptive impulse in me is being freed from only thinking in terms of the web. I’m taking the blinders off and looking at the whole field of play, not just one aspect of it.

Are you feeling this way also? Or is it just me?

Maybe this is a passing interest, a blip on my own radar, touched off by reading some article or other. Maybe I’ll go back to thinking in terms of innovation and web startups and cities and in another week or so.

Or maybe this is the new level of focus for me, the point of engagement with new ideas around me from now on.

What about you? Are you finding yourself these days with an increased appetite?

Still thinking about yesterday’s post on how Open is Dead, I took a short trip downtown today to check out and participate briefly in Occupy Wall Street. While I was there, I was reminded of this passage from the book Sex at Dawn (excellent book, a must-read). The passage is about Jane Goodall’s research with the (supposedly) warlike chimpanzees in Africa.

(Margaret) Power noticed that data Goodall collected in her first years at Gombe (from 1961 to 1965) painted a different picture of chimpanzee social interaction than the accounts of chimpanzee warfare she and her colleagues published to global acclaim a few years later. Observations from those first four years at Gombe had left Goodall with the impression that chimps were “far more peaceable than humans.” She saw no evidence of “war” between groups and only sporadic outbreaks of violence between individuals.

But Goodall’s impression of relative harmony was to change — not coincidentally, argues Power — precisely when she and her students began giving the chimps hundreds of bananas every day, to entice them to hang around the camp so they could be observed more easily.

In the wild, chimps spread out to search for food individually or in small groups. Because the food is scattered throughout the jungle, competition is unusual. But, as Frans de Waal explains, “as soon as humans start providing food, even in the jungle, the peace is quickly disturbed.”

Before the scientists started provisioning the apes, food appeared throughout the jungle, so the chimps spread out in search of something to eat each day. Chimps often call out to the others when they find a fruiting tree; mutual aid helps everyone and feeding in the forest isn’t a zero-sum endeavor. But once they learned that there would be a limited amount of easy food available in the same place each day, more and more chimps started arriving in aggressive, “noisy hordes”, and “hanging around”. Soon after, Goodall and her students began witnessing the now famous “warfare” between chimp groups.

Perhaps for the first time ever, the chimps had something worth fighting over: a concentrated, reliable, yet limited source of food. Suddenly, they lived in a zero-sum world.

Did you get that? It was the bananas that made the chimps warlike.

I feel like we’re all just chimps, hanging out in noisy hordes trying to get the bananas out of the box. And yeah, we’re warlike, because hell, there’s bananas in those boxes.

The people who work on Wall Street have found a way to get more bananas out than everyone else. And it’s gotten so bad that everyone else is now protesting for a fairer distribution of bananas.

But regardless of who gets what number of bananas, it’s still a zero-sum game we’re playing. One more banana for me means one less banana for you.

The question we should be asking ourselves right now is not just who should get what number of bananas, but how do we make it not a zero-sum game? How do we create a system where my helping you get bananas results in me getting more bananas too?

That’s where we need to go with this whole Occupy Wall Street thing. Not to a different division of bananas — that would just be retreading old ground — but to a different way of thinking about bananas and banana gathering entirely.

It’s a much tougher thing to figure out of course than just deciding how to split things up.

Will it get there? I don’t know.