Disruption, Crisis and Transdisciplinarity

Disruptive innovation gives impression of something good.

Maybe not always… It can bring unemployment, together with progress.

The after-postmodern notion of progress is not the same as in the 19^th century.

Today, the paradox concomitance of progress and crisis is possible.

So technical advance is not the same as “human” advance.

Transdisciplinarity can be a way to bring balance to this equation.

Transdisciplinarity is different from multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity.

Each one of these visions has its own context.

Transdisciplinarity deals with paradoxes without forget humanity and culture.

It can be a new tool to find exits and answers to the chronic crisis of the world.

Is “disruptive” an after-postmodern word?

In the last decade of the 20^th century, Clayton M. Christensen wrote about “disruptive innovation”, launching a new and specific kind of “paradigm changing” and a new vision of “invention”, in first place about market and development of technology in our days, in a complement, or even opposition, to the “sustaining innovation”, that is the innovation that just keep the things as they be. But “disruptive innovation” could also be applied for some discoveries in history of science and technology.

In the second decade of the 21^st century, almost in the third, the “disruptive” word has been used more and more in any circumstances, approaching the word to the “disruption concept” in the dictionaries. But it also reflects some after-postmodern visions. In postmodern times that was a certainty and a pragmatism that directed everything. Nowadays it seems that is a new way to “break the rules keeping the rules”.

In the sixties and seventies, it was a time for “deconstruction” of everything, combining with the “counterculture”. At the same time, pragmatism and certainty grew.

In the eighties and nineties, the pragmatism and certainty of postmodernity dominated.

The “disruptive” word started with “innovation”, but in the Macro-Shift of Erwin Lazslo, it became an amplified concept, together with the “liquid” of Baumann, the “transdisciplinarity” of Morin. They and others were visionaries of the future. And now we are in the after-postmodern times.