Disruptions are about pulling reality one step closer to your fantasies and imagination

Disruption.

From his life experiences, Dhairya Dand has distilled some lessons about disruption.

I think he offers the ingredients for a positive disruption and innovation mindset.

I think we can learn from his approach in the immigrant and refugee-serving sector.

“I always thought it was a scary buzzword so I never really used it. But before coming here I looked in the dictionary and I realized that it means to interrupt (an event, activity, or process) and to drastically alter (the structure of something), to change. So I was like, okay, that’s not that scary after all.”

I think most of us still look at disruption both as a buzzword, as well as something scary. Disruption means change. And change is hard (especially when it feels like it’s not at all encouraged or supported). Which is why I found this presentation so illuminating. Watch it, see what you think, and let me know what you think!

The lessons

Each lesson comes from his own personal experience. I wonder what experiences you have had in the sector which might fit into one or more of these lessons.

• Disruptions can emerge from our limitations.
• Disruptions are about pulling reality one step closer to your fantasies and imagination.
• Disruption can sometimes be about simple solutions to big problems. Solutions that are not so obvious but they just seem right after you do it.
• Disruptions can be quite fun.
• Disruptions can emerge from fear. All of us have fear, but only if you’re comfortable with fear if you can accept the fear.
• Disruptions can be found in our own habits and behaviors. All of us have our own habits that we want to change and this is where you can find the opportunity for disruption.
• Disruptions are best found in our frustrations with the present. All of us have something that we’re going through today that we’re like, this is wrong, this should not be like this. So let’s change it.
• Disruptions don’t need technology. They just need eyes.

His final thought offers us some questions in the immigrant and refugee-serving sector.

“If you look at disruption, which is interruption of a system, of an event, or drastically altering something, or doing some change. That is the core essence of life. We take something that’s been given to us and then all of us shape it, we touch it, we interrupt it, we disrupt it with our own experiences. In a small way or a big way, it doesn’t matter. For me it was technology and design. For you it is journalism. Maybe it is poetry. Maybe it’s sports. But you use that to disrupt what you have, and then you share it. You pass it on to the next generation. So, disrupt is, you.”

How have you taken something in your limiting box of funding or organization or program rigidity and disrupted it? How have you disrupted what you’ve been given, however small? How are you sharing it? How can we learn from each other’s disruptions?