President’s Memo: Pardon the Disruption

Anyone remember those once cutting-edge business terms like “synergy” or “paradigm shift”? How about “thinking outside the box”—an expression that today sounds more and more like the box itself. Lately, I’ve been wondering when “disrupt” (or “disruption” or “disruptor”) might be tossed onto the buzzword trash heap.

In case you didn’t know, “disrupt” arises from the Latin root rumpere, which means “to break”—the word itself translating roughly as “to break apart.” This root plays a role in other words, too, such as “corrupt.” Its prefix means “altogether” or “thoroughly,” so corruption is, in fact, a state of total breakdown. Which begs the question: Might these words exist on a spectrum, and if so, can an excessive desire for disruption begin to erode sound judgement?

One reason I look forward to seeing “disruption” join the jargon graveyard is that I don’t think we question the premise of the term enough. Unconventional thinking is, of course, desirable, but treating destruction as proof of originality seems more like a symptom of our times than a solution to them. Does one disrupt, move on, only to disrupt again? But who assembles the pieces into something built to last, to matter?

Tech companies, which seem to invoke the term most often, also appear to be the ones least equipped to challenge themselves to see beyond disruption and toward lasting impact. How might our social media ecosystems have been designed differently if more emphasis had been placed on what was being built rather than what was being broken?

It’s no surprise that the arena in which these forces are now most active is artificial intelligence (AI). AI’s potential for disruption is clear, but is that potential being balanced by its constructive promise? There’s a difference, for example, between using AI to inform thinking and using it to replace thinking. Once you understand that AI’s language models have been trained on centuries of hard-won creative human thought, you also realize that their current capacity is largely to assemble, distill and re-present those thoughts. Such aggregations and integrations are useful, but where do they leave the original idea—the elusive insight that goes where the data can’t point? Where do they leave our wrestling with intellectual concepts—a process that not only embeds genuine wisdom within us but also leads to the inspirations that blaze new trails? Trails that human thought will invariably follow and from which future AI models will again aggregate?

Several years ago, I read an article about Julian Fellowes, creator of the megahit Downton Abbey. He described how, when pitching the show to producers, he faced resistance to period or class dramas. He was told that the data didn’t support the genre. Yet 10 million viewers were drawn to the show in its debut season, millions more in the five that followed, not to mention the three films and the cottage industry of imitators that have since sprung up.

I recalled that article when reading a recent study that analyzed AI chatbot behavior while people sought advice on personal dilemmas. Fascinatingly, the chatbots endorsed users’ intended or already taken actions were 49 percent more often than a human being would. No doubt this approach endears the AI to its user—possibly because that’s its true business model—but doesn’t it also bypass that vital contrarianism we need to gaze inward, to consider the anti-pattern, to hear what we need to hear versus what we want to hear—and to grow accordingly?

I think the implications of this study—for our etiquette, our politics, our self-awareness as individuals and evolution as communities—are intriguing. It would be a sobering irony were AI to prove most disruptive in convincing us it knows best, and leave in its wake a consensus of either sycophantic mediocrity or righteous indignation.

But what, you might ask, does any of this have to do with NASBA?

These days, almost everywhere I look at NASBA, a project of reimagination is taking place. The strategic plan process may be the clearest example. As I, and not AI, write this column, the two task forces analyzing the copious Diagnostic feedback from 90 percent of our membership have proposed 155 far and near-term solutions for NASBA’s reinvention. One hundred and fifty-five—and that’s only for four (out of the six) areas we’ve explored so far. These ideas will be honed by the task forces, and then further refined by your contributions. But consider for a moment the kind of time and deep contemplation necessary for such a trove of transformational guidance.

I see this same spirit in NASBA’s development of an overarching tech strategy that will leverage our informational assets for member benefit; in the continuing fine-tuning of candidate services, such as our CPA Mobile App (which has been downloaded more than 40,000 times) and application processing (the time for which has been reduced from 10 weeks to 10 days); and in the proposed revisions spearheaded by our Ethics and Regulatory Response committees to the AICPA Code of Professional Conduct for Alternative Practice Structures.

NASBA is changing. In fact, you could say that one way we’re “disrupting” business as usual is by pushing aside disruption itself. We’re resisting remedies that may offer instant gratification but lack accuracy and will lead to frustration later. Rather than addressing surface-level symptoms, we’re digging into deeper layers to find the genuine solution.

Delving to where real insight flows isn’t easy and can take time, but I’ve come to believe it’s what separates the groundbreaking from the merely broken.