Stop Calling Everything “Disruptive”

The word “disruptive” has become the business world’s favorite compliment, tossed around like confetti at a product launch. A new app that lets you order coffee slightly faster? Disruptive. A website with a cleaner interface? Disruptive. A subscription service for literally anything? You guessed it, disruptive.

We’ve reached a point where calling something disruptive means about as much as calling it innovative, game-changing, or revolutionary. Which is to say, it means almost nothing at all.

This linguistic inflation didn’t happen by accident. It happened because we fundamentally misunderstood what disruption actually means, then decided the misunderstanding sounded better than the truth. The result is a business culture that celebrates the wrong things, funds the wrong ideas, and misses genuinely transformative change when it’s happening right in front of us.

What Disruption Actually Means

Clayton Christensen introduced the theory of disruptive innovation in 1995, and it described something specific and counterintuitive. Disruption wasn’t about being better. It was about being worse in ways that eventually became better.

The classic example is the personal computer. When PCs arrived, they were objectively terrible compared to the mainframe computers that businesses relied on. They had less processing power, less storage, less of everything that mattered to serious users. Mainframe manufacturers looked at these toys and dismissed them entirely. Why would anyone trade down?

But PCs had something else. They were cheap enough and simple enough that regular people could own them. They opened computing to an entirely new market that didn’t need mainframe power. And once they had a foothold, they improved. Eventually, they improved so much that they started satisfying the needs of mainstream customers too. By the time mainframe manufacturers noticed the threat, it was too late.

This is what makes disruption different from ordinary competition. It doesn’t win by being better at what incumbents do. It wins by changing what matters.

Disruption enters at the bottom or the fringe. It serves customers who are overserved by existing solutions, or customers who couldn’t access existing solutions at all. It trades performance for accessibility, sophistication for simplicity, quality for convenience. And critically, it improves along a different trajectory than incumbents expect.

When we call every new product or service disruptive, we’re not just being imprecise. We’re obscuring a useful framework for understanding how markets actually evolve.

The Sustaining Innovation Confusion

Most of what we call disruption is actually sustaining innovation. It makes existing products better for existing customers in expected ways. A faster processor. A sharper camera. A more intuitive interface. These improvements matter, but they’re playing the same game by the same rules.

Sustaining innovation is how incumbents stay ahead. It’s incremental progress along established trajectories. The iPhone 17 is better than the iPhone 16, which was better than the iPhone 15. This is valuable work, but it’s not disruption.

The confusion partly comes from a related phenomenon called efficiency innovation. This is when companies find ways to do more with less. Better logistics. Automated processes. Optimized supply chains. These innovations increase productivity and profit margins, and businesses love them for obvious reasons.

But efficiency innovation makes existing business models work better without fundamentally changing what those business models are. Real disruptive opportunities look different. They’re in the spaces incumbents ignore because those spaces seem too small, too unprofitable, or too unsophisticated to matter.

Why We Got It Wrong

The misuse of “disruptive” isn’t random. It serves a purpose, just not the one we claim.

In Silicon Valley and the broader startup ecosystem, disruption became a secular religion. It’s the story founders tell investors, investors tell limited partners, and everyone tells themselves. The narrative goes like this: we’re not just building a business, we’re overturning an industry, challenging the establishment, changing the world.

This story attracts capital. Venture investors don’t want incremental returns. They want exponential ones. They’re looking for companies that can grow fast enough to return their entire fund. Incremental improvement doesn’t do that. You need a revolution.

So every pitch deck promises disruption whether it makes sense or not. The word became a signal, a badge, proof that this idea is worthy of attention and money. The problem is that most investors couldn’t tell real disruption from clever marketing anyway. The distinction got lost in the noise.

There’s also a psychological appeal to thinking of yourself as a disruptor. It feels good. You’re not just starting a company. You’re fighting against complacent giants, championing the underdog, democratizing access, empowering users. It’s a hero narrative, and humans love hero narratives.

But this narrative can blind you to reality. If you think you’re disrupting an industry when you’re actually competing head to head with established players, you’ll make strategic mistakes. You’ll underprice what capital you need. You’ll misunderstand why customers might not switch. You’ll pick fights you can’t win.

The irony is that actual disruptors often don’t realize they’re being disruptive. They’re just trying to serve a market that incumbents ignore. They’re solving a problem for people who currently have no good solution. The disruption emerges from that focus, not from an intention to disrupt.

The Pattern Recognition Problem

Part of why disruption is so misidentified is that it looks unimpressive at first. That’s not a bug. It’s a feature.

When digital cameras first appeared, they were terrible compared to film. Lower resolution, worse color accuracy, limited functionality. Professional photographers dismissed them entirely. But amateurs loved them. You could see your photos immediately. You could take hundreds of shots without buying film. You could delete the bad ones. These advantages mattered more to casual users than megapixels and color depth.

The professionals were right that digital cameras were inferior by the standards that mattered in professional photography. They were wrong about whether those standards would remain the standards that mattered.

This is the pattern recognition problem. We judge new technologies by how well they perform on the metrics we already care about. But disruptive technologies often change which metrics matter.

Early online retailers couldn’t match the instant gratification of walking into a store and leaving with your purchase. But they could offer selection and convenience that physical retail couldn’t match. For many product categories, that trade-off made sense.

The challenge is that the early versions of disruptive technologies look so inferior that dismissing them seems rational. And it is rational, if you’re evaluating them on current terms. The mistake is assuming the terms won’t change.

Incumbents have a particularly hard time with this. Their business models, processes, and culture are all optimized around current metrics. When something performs poorly on those metrics, their entire organization tells them to ignore it. This isn’t stupidity. It’s the rational response to the incentives they face. Their customers aren’t asking for the new thing. Their financials look better if they focus on existing products. Their expertise is in the old way of doing things.

This is why disruption usually comes from outsiders. Not because outsiders are smarter, but because they’re not constrained by the need to protect existing revenue streams and satisfy existing customers.

What Actually Matters

If we stopped calling everything disruptive, what would we call genuinely transformative changes?

One useful frame is to ask: who can now do something they couldn’t do before? True disruption expands access. It brings something to people who were previously excluded by cost, complexity, or availability.

Mobile banking in developing countries is disruptive not because it’s a better way to bank for people who already had bank accounts. It’s disruptive because it brings banking to people who had no access to formal financial services at all. When millions of people gain access to credit, savings, and money transfer for the first time, that changes economic possibilities in fundamental ways.

Another frame is to ask: what job is this being hired to do? People don’t buy products for their features. They hire them to accomplish something. Disruption often comes from doing the same job in a radically different way, or enabling a job that couldn’t be done before.

Fast food didn’t disrupt fine dining. It created a new category by unbundling the jobs that restaurants were being hired for. Sometimes you want an experience. Sometimes you just want calories quickly. Fast food excels at the second job even though it’s terrible at the first.

The most powerful question might be: what becomes abundant? Disruptive technologies often work by making something scarce become abundant. Personal computers made computing abundant. The internet made information and communication abundant. Renewable energy is making electricity abundant. Each transition creates winners and losers, new possibilities and obsolete business models.

Abundance is counterintuitive as a source of value. We’re trained to think scarcity creates value. And it does, in existing markets. But abundance creates entirely new markets. When something goes from scarce to abundant, all the things built around managing that scarcity become unnecessary, and all the things made possible by abundance become feasible.

The Cost of Misuse

When everything is disruptive, nothing is disruptive. But the cost is more than just linguistic precision.

First, it makes it harder to identify genuine disruption when it happens. If we’re constantly crying wolf, we stop taking the warning seriously. Actual disruptive threats can build momentum while incumbents dismiss them as just another overhyped startup.

Second, it misallocates capital and attention. Investors pour money into companies claiming to disrupt industries when those companies are actually pursuing sustaining innovations. Meanwhile, genuinely disruptive opportunities get overlooked because they look too small, too weird, or too focused on unimportant customers.

Third, it creates false expectations. Founders who believe their sustaining innovation will have disruptive impact underestimate the resources needed and the timeline required. They crash when reality doesn’t match the narrative.

Fourth, it corrupts strategy. If you think you’re a disruptor, you might ignore your most dangerous competitors. You might focus on challenging incumbents head-on instead of finding your own territory. You might optimize for growth at all costs when steady progress would be more appropriate.

The misuse of “disruptive” is particularly problematic because the concept itself is valuable. Understanding how disruption works helps explain market evolution, incumbent failure, and the rise of new players. It’s a lens that reveals dynamics that are otherwise confusing. But only if we use it correctly.

A More Honest Vocabulary

What if we were more precise about what we’re actually doing?

When you make an existing product better, call it improvement. There’s no shame in that. Most successful businesses are built on continuous improvement. The iPhone is successful not because it disrupted anything recently, but because Apple keeps making it better in ways customers value.

When you find a more efficient way to deliver existing value, call it optimization. Amazon’s logistics network is remarkable, but it’s fundamentally about moving physical goods from warehouses to homes faster and cheaper. That’s optimization, and it’s enormously valuable.

When you create something genuinely new that serves an unmet need, call it innovation. Innovation doesn’t require disrupting anything. It just requires solving problems in new ways.

Save disruption for the specific pattern Christensen described. Something that starts by serving low-end or non-consumers with a solution that’s worse by traditional metrics but better on dimensions those traditional metrics ignore. Something that improves along a different trajectory and eventually becomes good enough to satisfy mainstream demand. Something that forces incumbents to choose between their existing business and responding to the threat.

This precision isn’t pedantry. It’s clarity. And clarity is increasingly rare in business discourse, where we wrap every new idea in superlatives and hope the enthusiasm obscures the lack of substance.

The Real Work

Perhaps the most important thing we lose when we call everything disruptive is honesty about the actual work required.

Building a genuinely disruptive business is hard in specific ways. You have to be comfortable serving customers incumbents ignore. You have to be patient while your solution improves. You have to resist the temptation to chase mainstream customers before you’re ready. You have to find ways to sustain yourself financially while operating in markets that initially look too small to matter.

These challenges are different from the challenges of beating established players at their own game. Both are hard, but they require different strategies, different resources, different timing.

When we collapse everything into “disruption,” we lose the ability to think clearly about these differences. We end up with startups that are neither fish nor fowl, trying to be disruptive while also competing on traditional metrics, serving new markets while also chasing existing ones, moving fast while also trying to break things, whatever that means.

The best businesses often succeed not by disrupting anything but by executing well on a clear vision. They understand their customers, deliver value consistently, and build sustainable operations. That’s less sexy than disruption, but it’s also less likely to end in spectacular failure.

There’s room in the economy for disruption, for sustaining innovation, for efficiency gains, for optimization, and for incremental improvement. We need all of these. But we need to know which one we’re doing.

The language we use shapes how we think. When we call everything disruptive, we train ourselves to miss distinctions that matter. We chase a particular kind of story instead of looking clearly at reality.

Maybe the most disruptive thing we could do is stop using the word disruptive. Start talking about what we’re actually building, who we’re actually serving, and what problem we’re actually solving. That clarity might feel less revolutionary, but it would be more honest. And honesty, it turns out, is pretty innovative.