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Belligerence – whether through critical reactions to aggressive warmongering, hostile takeovers or bullying and ignorant responses to others – has fittingly earned a bad reputation. In the business context of culture building, belligerence ranks quite high on the HR list of ‘don'ts’ – and usually, rightfully so. But there is also a tendency to confuse belligerent behaviour with bullying. This can prompt companies to discourage or ‘weed out’ employees with qualities like individualism and passion, simply because they don't fit the ‘preferred behaviour’ for team members.

As Niccolo Machiavelli recognized, ‘there is nothing more difficult and dangerous, or more doubtful of success, than an attempt to introduce a new order of things’ (The Prince, 1532). As an arch strategist, Machiavelli often advocated patient diplomacy; however, he also understood that belligerent tenacity is sometimes the only way to deal with the aggressive denial that people tend to direct against the untried and untested. As he explained it:

whenever the opponents of the new order of things have the opportunity to attack it, they will do it with the zeal of partisans, whilst the others defend it but feebly, so that it is dangerous to rely upon the latter.

(Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1532)

Machiavelli's understanding that any level of change ambition needs to anticipate and negotiate access with the gatekeepers, whose primary motive is to maintain the status quo, is a useful reminder that innovation has not become any easier 500 or so years later.

The expression of personal angst at a slow or ‘no’ decision can cause us to dismiss an individual's passionate commitment to winning as aggressive hostility. But belligerence is part of what makes great artists and great brands succeed. Picasso acquired a reputation for being unreasonable when he railed against realism, but his courage to persist and ignore the naysayers of the world allowed him to create a unique brand.

In our current climate of political correctness overkill, ‘telling it how it is’ is often characterized as offensive, or at the very least insensitive. But a lack of robust critical response can lead to a culture of mediocrity. Hanging in there when the chips are down is a central theme of disruption.

How RIM Succeeded and Failed by Being Belligerent

RIM, or ‘Research In Motion’, is best known for the development of the smartphone market with the launch of the Blackberry. RIM's rise and fall has been attributed to the personality of its founding partner, engineer and former CEO Mike Lazaridis. Lazaridis created a business culture that favoured engineering over marketing. While this approach fuelled innovation, it also created a lack of sympathy for alternative points of view.

Blackberry's major innovation was the 1999 creation of a mobile email facility that would operate globally. As a result, the phone became the default choice for business executives and their key staff and by 2007, RIM was worth $42 billion. However, this was the year that Steve Jobs, another CEO renowned for belligerence, announced the iPhone, and by 2014 RIM's share of the smartphone market has shrunk to 0.6 percent. The difference in the roots of Lazardis and Jobs offers a tantalizing example of art versus science. Jobs had an ability to think and act like an artist and, because of that, he was prepared to bet the bank on the strength of an intuitive hunch. Lazardis, on the other hand, thought and acted like an engineer, relying on scientific method to test and refine the product in the understanding that performance was the main selling point. Lazardis is clear about his belief in process:

One of the things that we've really internalised here at RIM, is the belief in the numbers, belief in mathematics, belief in the limits imposed by physics, and the general understanding of physics. If you don't understand the limitations you can't design something that works well within those limitations. 3

Thinking Fast – Thinking Slow

Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman supports the theory that we rely too heavily on our conditioned ability for rational deduction. He argues that our tendency to make decisions slowly is informed by our mistrust of the new. Most of us get the future a bit later than the people who invented and promoted it – but as soon as we do get there, it seems natural and inevitable. The delay factor is not just informed by the predictable gap between our ability to come to terms with something that we have not experienced before; it is also influenced by our fear of being out of step. Someone who is emotionally and rationally orientated is effectively pulled in two directions at the same time. We find it difficult to comprehend or trust what's new; yet we have also been encouraged by our inquisitive minds to relish fresh opportunities. The conflict between our instinctive fascination with novelty and our conditioned reliance on logical deduction can lead to us to repress rather than encourage innovation, much in the way that we might try and suppress desires that the moral majority have deemed aberrant. We also know that once we are perceived as ‘out of touch’, redundancy looms – which is exactly what happened to Kodak.

Kodak: the High Price of Thinking Slow

The shocking disruption of Kodak's 100 plus year dominance of the photographic market represents the dangers of creating a hierarchical business that does not allow room for belligerent behaviour. Kodak's crisis was not due to lack of innovation; indeed, they were first off the block with the invention of the digital camera. They simply didn't have any team members who were belligerent enough to encourage the rest of the organization to let go of the past.

Unpacking

When we engage with a brand we always start with at least a morning of ‘unpacking’, during which we encourage stakeholders to announce their frustrations and anxieties and to identify the source of the gatekeeping that is stifling opportunity. This process provides insight into exactly what is holding the brand back from achieving its innovation potential. In the case of Kodak we are confident that the topic of a digital future would have been raised to the top of the agenda. We wish we could have gotten to Kodak at that key moment where someone was sitting in a lab with the world's first digital camera on a table while someone else sat in a boardroom looking at a Kodachome image of their future.

The Dream Café allows participants to harvest and respect internal initiatives, because we are able to locate them within a context of interdisciplinary wisdom that uncovers new ways of evaluating perceptions of possible futures. These projections include a respect for the brand's heritage. Additionally, much of what we do involves a rediscovery of attitudes that have simply been buried under decades of iterative innovation. Often, it's just the passage of time that has caused the root passion for the brand to be forgotten.

Ultimately aligning the brand vision so that it is future focused requires the reconciliation of the past with the present – and it does involve a lot of kicking and screaming for those who believe that letting go is an act of betrayal. But innovation never needs to be a fist fight. Belligerence can be constructive; it's all about providing a platform for alternative opinions.

The ‘damned if you do, damned if you don't’ syndrome can create the kind of indecision that leads to doing nothing for fear of doing the wrong thing. In the context of the arts, belligerence has been popularly associated with a tendency to over indulge in drink and drugs. The stereotype of the belligerent artist is someone who is vulnerable to schizophrenic mood swings, in which euphoric highs are countered by deeply depressed lows that can lead to a life of self-destruction. Welsh Poet Dylan Thomas, American abstract artist Jackson Pollock and American writer Hunter S Thompson are examples of the kind of raw material from which this stereotype has been hewn.

Creating the future is always going to be a painful journey that involves overcoming, or at least harnessing, self-doubt, misunderstanding, resistance and rejection. While there is often some innate condition that explains a self-destructive journey, the gap between self-belief and misunderstanding is often one in which the humiliation of rejection leads to rage. Despite some attempts at legislating against ageism, we continue to inhabit a world where disruption is still associated with youthful exuberance. In other words, many believe it should be something that we will ‘grow out of’.

The conditioning that programmes our minds, and then our hearts, into tacit acceptance of the status quo is the enemy of disruption. There is absolutely no reason why older people cannot be as disruptive as anyone else. The mental and emotional slippage that leads us to accept that rebellion is the prerogative of the young is likely a by-product of what we have been taught, rather than a syndrome of what we can no longer do. Fighting against the obstacles in our way is simply a matter of passion.