I still remember the day I read my friend Charles O'Reilly's fantastic (and now award-winning) paper on the stages of disruptive innovation. He had asked me and Perry for comments on an early draft, and almost instantly, I felt like Neo. (I'll get into why another time; suffice it to say the paper gave me an empirical response to accusations of multiple personality disorder from students whom I had taught in "idea generation mode" as they entered into the distinctive phase of "incubation.")

And almost just as instantly, I sought to incorporate his framework into how we introduced the design thinking process, or rather, to couch the introduction of design thinking in this broader framework of innovation. "Design thinking belongs in the exploratory side of the business, as an exceptional exploratory idea generation methodology... If it feels unfamiliar, that's because it is different from what you're doing in the routine, day to day operations side of the business." And it worked, in theory...

The truth is, though, that as I have observed the implications of such positioning in practice now for the past 2+ years, I have come to believe that this distinction is an unnecessary distraction. Why?

1) the reality is that incremental innovation is a really good thing; and positioning design thinking exclusively as "exploratory" minimizes the impact that it can, should, and does have in incremental innovation efforts. It get folks to dismiss meaningful outputs that are more incremental in nature, and sadly skews group energy away from concepts with legitimate value creation potential.

2) I'm persuaded by Safi Bahcall's argument in his excellent "Loonshots" that "disruptive innovation" is likely a better retrospective descriptor than a prescriptive ambition. I won't steal the thunder from his arguments; but he is quite thoughtful, and convincing...

That's not to say that disruption isn't real, or that the need to defend against it isn't urgent; but it is to say that I don't want to put design thinking in that box.

The biggest benefit to couching the tools of design in the explore v exploit model is that it gave abundant passage to the need to work differently, and helped folks appreciate why the mindsets of design often felt so unfamiliar. But I think there are ways we can emphasize the novelty of the approach, and the need for practice in order to improve, without imposing the unnecessary and distracting constraint of "disruptive innovation."

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