Disruption as the Status Quo

McKinsey's recent article by Homayoun Hatami, Dana Maor, and Patrick Simon, "All change: The new era of perpetual organizational upheaval," points out that today's leaders are dealing with "massive shifts" shaking their operating and strategic environments. These words could just as well describe the world of academic leaders grappling with the combinatorial effects of the pandemic, racial reckoning, economic turbulence, and social/political unrest.

It is worth noting that Peter Vaill wrote a book in 1996 using the phrase "permanent white water" in the subtitle, describing the same sort of chronic upheaval, albeit engendered by a convergence of different factors. Maybe the takeaway is that disruption of the status quo is more normal than we think; in fact, disruption may be the status quo.