You want to DISRUPT my TECH? How about I DISRUPT your FACE?

Disruption – it’s fantastic, isn’t it?

Of course, disruption wasn’t always called “disruption”. It just happens to be the misleading jargon of the moment. Before “disruption”, it was known by other expressions equally likely to trigger the Bullshitter Klaxon, such as “innovation” and “convergence”, even though what they usually meant was “incompatibility”, “divergence” and “messing things up at your expense”.

I have met enough bearded deadheads in London’s Tech City to know that at the first utterance of the catchphrase “disruptive technology”, you should run a square mile or reach for your staple gun.

Each time I challenged these hirsute types to explain what they mean by “disruption”, they would use lots of garble to try and prolong their hoodwinkment of potential investors in the room. Either that, or they had no idea themselves and were just jargonising because everyone else in Shoreditch does it too.

Possibly I am being unfair on companies offering “disruptive” services. For example, take personal impact training experts CorporACTLive, who reckon the fintech industry will benefit from what they call “disruptive training”. Oh, don’t mock! Read what they have to say first and then decide:

“We offer performance-style learning events with world-class actors. Our events are short, thought-provoking live shows that use humour and empathy to open people’s minds in a controlled environment.

“The aim is a shift in the collective consciousness of a group, and small but high-impact changes in behaviour being implemented ‘in public’ as a result. Our style is purposefully disruptive.”

Decided yet? I pass no comment. Yet I’m no further forward in my quest: what does “disruption” mean?

One suggestion is that it simply means “change”. In IT and engineering today, the rate of change is fast and it is getting faster. This would, I concede, make it disruptive, but it is still just “change”.

Well, look, we already have a word for “change”. It’s “change”.

To get a second opinion, this week I met up with John Straw, founder of iDisrupted, a media company that reports on disrupted technologies for big nobs. He is fully aware that the expression has become a bandwagon for some and, for others, a crude bludgeon with which to scare the shit out of spendthrift organisations dragging their IT heels.

According to Straw, “disruption” in tech means “strategic change”. I interpret this as meaning continuous, unrelenting and accelerating change in technology that requires a strategic response. It’s what Google and Facebook and Uber are up to: inventing new means of harvesting lots of information and manipulating it in smart new ways.

Smart and reprehensible ways, perhaps. However, disruption is what is already happening. To stay in business or take advantage in the public sector, you have to recognise what’s going on and do something, or give up. Even when you’ve got it nailed, everything changes again, and so it continues.

I think the trick is to identify whether someone is trying to sell you strategic change or a load of smoke and mirrors to convince you to invest in some crappy little app. And don’t get me started on the whole Uber and “sharing economy” thing.

In the meantime, be content that I finally established what is meant by “disrupt”. I just looked in the dictionary: it means “to prevent something from continuing as expected; destabilise, dislocate, undermine, unsettle, upset, scupper.”

Sounds great.

Depending upon whether your boss hires Steve-the-TNT, it may also mean “cock things up royally by twiddling about a bit and then fucking off before the job’s properly done.”

But then I suspect you’ve experienced Steve for yourselves already. ®