The Disruption Fallacy

SMARTEST TAKEAWAYS
Business Innovation Concepts

“If only more leaders would understand these (concepts), we could avoid a lot of pain in the innovation space.” — Frederic Larmuseau, Former CEO at Jacobs Douwe Egberts and author of the book’s Foreward

1️⃣ Lindy Principle: “The longer something has survived, the longer it’s likely to keep going. In innovation, this suggests old, battle-tested methods might outlast the latest hyped-up tech that’s still wet behind the ears. Sorry startup bros, grandma’s knitting needles will outlive your AI app.”

2️⃣ Gell-Mann Amnesia: “After spotting nonsense in a field you know, you still trust the next expert claim in one you don’t. In business, this means swallowing shaky forecasts after debunking a bad report. Sarcasm: Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, well, I’ve already forgotten.”

3️⃣ Jevons paradox: “Efficiency improvements in resource use often lead to increased consumption, not conservation. In production, this means better tech might just mean more waste, as companies ramp up output to cash in. Also, your phone uses more computing power to shoot birds at pigs than the Apollo moon lander used to take us to the moon.”

INSIGHTFUL EXAMPLE
Chesterton’s Fence

“Imagine you moved to a hilly countryside, a picturesque little cottage in a valley. For weeks you explore the surrounding hills and get to know the area. One beautiful summer’s morning you walk past an old fence standing on a hillside. Oddly enough, it’s just a short strip of fence, open at the outer ends. Anything it might want to keep in or out can just walk around. It seems unnecessary, ugly and rather inconveniently in the way of your daily stroll further up the hill and back home.

You remove the fence and enjoy lovely, uninterrupted walks all summer up and down the hill from your house in the valley.

The following winter your house is buried under an avalanche now that the fence no longer locks heavy snowfall in place.”

Put it into action: Use this principle to think through the “too-good-to-be-true disruptive ideas” that come your way.

Chesterton’s Fence helps you “look past the solution itself and interrogate the problem it solved: maybe that problem was in fact an old solution you’d better not tinker with.”

BOOK FACTS
The Disruption Fallacy

• First Published: April 10, 2025

• Print length: 166 pages

• Listening length: N/A

• Ratings: N/A

PACE LAYERING
Building Innovation Inertia

Why do some things change easily, while others seem impossible to budge?

Pace Layering—a concept from Stuart Brand’s book The Clock of the Long Now—explains how different layers of civilization move at different speeds, and why trying to force things to change at the wrong pace or multiple layers at once is a recipe for disaster. The relationship between the layers is equally important: change in one requires support from below.

The chart below is Costas’ interpretation of Stuart Brand’s framework, adopted to reflect a business context:

FROM THE AUTHOR
Other Books

• Tail Wag Dog: Business satire poking fun at the crazy stuff that passes for serious in the world of Big Business

• I Got 99 Problems But a Pitch Ain’t One: Ninety-nine popular memes translated into business language for people born after 1990 or who simply don’t like reading

• Grumpy Innovator: Polemic articles and witty aphorisms

  • #1: Mistaking your map of the category for how the real world works

  • #2: Mis-aligning the business objective and innovation objective

  • #3: Not following through on what makes good ideas truly viable

• The MAGIC Ingredient: An effective guide for creative professionals who want to win more business and charge what they’re worth

EXPERT INTERVIEW
An Interview with Costas