Rules are created based on some kind of analysis using known information which means it is past-orientated and limited by information depth. Analysis can never factor every possible variable and once implemented, a rule affects its own change within the environment, making the original analysis increasingly obsolete.
Even without the rule-based influence changes, systems that lay outside of the scope of the rule apply external pressures upon the environment in which the rule operates. At some point, the created rule can no longer support the conflicting pressures and breaks beyond repair.
In short, every rule is created imperfectly for an environment that is constantly changing and therefore will always become unstable and unsuitable in time. The only rules that lay outside of this are those that exist naturally and universally. These rules always have been and always will be, are unbiased and unbending and apply to all equally.
Avoid risk or understand it?
Breaking rules creates instability and risk which are things often avoided but, the very nature of changing environments means that instability is always present. The more complex and rigid a rule-based system becomes, the more open it is to breakage and catastrophic failure.
The bureaucracies within such systems require constant monitoring, repair or adjustment and each change inevitably creates new and often unpredictable stress on other sections of the framework. When these nodes and links are targeted by external sources, uncontrolled system disruption happens and the potential for the very foundation of the framework to be destroyed increases exponentially.
Resulting in?
For the disruptor, huge benefits can be gathered by breaking the old and creating the new. A new framework can be built that takes advantage of more relevant and higher quality information, process and technologies. For the disrupted, mass panic can ensue as full restructuring is required in areas that are unfamiliar, by people who were content with the old system and therefore less likely to embrace or develop change.
Next steps
The risk for the disruptor past the initial disruption is twofold. With each new framework comes the likelihood that the new rules become the new status quo and quite soon, the disruptor can itself become the next target for disruption. To combat this, a disruptor often grows a framework quickly and aggressively in order to create barriers of entry for possible challengers which of course will eventually cause a repetition of the entire process.
The second risk is that each successful disruption attracts more potential disruptors into the entire environment, not just within a specific industry. As disruption becomes more commonplace in all industries, change events increase and affect other, unrelated industry at an increasing speed. This highly volatile process means that the prediction of all possible challengers and risk variables is approaching impossible.
Seeing the network
Because, as an industry matures it seeks stability by creating rules and there are more disruption seekers in the system, it is easy to see how both the complexity of the system and the chance of breaking the system increase. Massive changes in markets can happen in very short time frames as industries are both built and ripped apart at lightning speeds.
Global economies and interconnections mean that the network is increasingly vast and dependent, and pulling on one thread can have unexpected and enormous butterfly effects on other threads. Global financial crises, the extinction of entire industries and turmoil and conflict across numerous arenas and market segments can provide testimony.
Adapt or disappear
The way to survive in such systems may be a combination effort of self-disruption whilst continually evolving traditional components. The challenge then becomes an amalgamation of those experienced by both disruptor and the disrupted: How to break rules in an environment created to protect those very rules with people who are adverse to change?
Hint: Look at yourself.
Taraz