The reigning fashion in business prose treats organisational upheaval as a kind of moral achievement. To disrupt is to be vital, to be modern, to be on the right side of whatever curve the consultants are currently invoking. The verb has migrated from a clinical description of competitive dynamics into a slogan that no executive wishing to seem serious can quite afford to do without When the founder of a well-known social media company declared that his motto was "move fast and break things", he was not, by his own later admission, expressing an aesthetic preference. He was articulating an industry-wide theology in which the shattering itself was held to be productive.
This way of speaking has consequences. It encourages boards to commission transformation programmes before they have understood why their organisation works to the limited degree that it does. It encourages newly appointed leaders to mistake the inheritance they have received for a problem rather than a resource. And it has produced a generation of managerial writing in which the test of a strategy is no longer whether it is sound but whether it is sufficiently bold—a category which, on inspection, often resolves into the question of how many existing arrangements one is willing to break before lunch.
There is an older voice on these matters worth recovering, and it belongs to a man who watched a great deal of disruption at close quarters and was unimpressed by most of it. Edmund Burke (1729–1797) is mainly remembered, when he is remembered at all, as the philosophical opponent of revolution. This is true but importantly incomplete. His real quarrel was not with change but with a particular style of changing—one whose contemporary expression in the language of disruption he would have recognised in about four pages of any current management bestseller.
The Wisdom of the Fence
Burke's central argument, set out at length in Reflections on the Revolution in France and developed across thirty years of Parliamentary speeches, is that institutions are not arbitrary arrangements that any reasonably intelligent person could replace from first principles. They are accumulations of practical learning, deposited by generations of people working out how to cooperate under pressure. The forms that survive do so because they have been tested—usually painfully—against circumstances their designers did not anticipate. To dismiss them as the residue of less enlightened ages is to mistake one's own cleverness for the wisdom of the species, and to discard, in the name of reason, the only resource against which reason has any hope of correcting itself.
This is the position G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) would later compress into the parable of the fence: the reformer who proposes to tear it down, having failed to ask why it was put up, is not yet competent to remove it. The point is that the question of why it stands is logically prior to the question of whether it should. An astonishing amount of contemporary organisational transformation proceeds in the opposite order.