The Disruptor’s Secret Pulse
Most leaders think innovation is about doing more: more meetings, more pilots, more tech.
Or they believe that they should “do things differently”. They’re wrong.
Imagine this: A regional bank tasked its strategy team with inventing new financial services. They all came back with “apps, APIs, dashboards”, the usual stuff.
Then someone asked: “What if credit wasn’t a bank product, but a service anyone could embed?”
That one shift, thinking across domains, sparked Afterpay. As of 2023, Afterpay serves over 24 million users, partners with 348,000 merchants globally, and processes US$27.3 billion in payments across its network.
A simple insight: decouple credit from banks, embed it in checkout, and empower the consumer. That’s how “Buy Now, Pay Later” reshaped retail.
The truth is: your innovation pipeline fails not because of execution but because your team hasn’t been trained to think differently.
Innovators don’t just solve problems; they build new problem spaces through associational thinking, linking unrelated ideas to spark breakthroughs.
If you don’t force collisions of domain, form, and metaphor, you’ll never break beyond incremental.
The Silent Constraint on Creativity
Doing more never leads to a breakthrough. Thinking differently does.
According to The Innovator’s DNA (Christensen, Dyer, Gregersen), associational thinkers score in the 88th percentile, while typical managers land at the 56th percentile in innovation capability. That’s a structural gap in mindset.
Disruptive firms, those that transform markets, outperform peers not just because they invest more. Studies show they consistently achieve 30–50% higher returns over time by creating new value logic, not optimised features. (Source: Innovator’s DNA)
Associating sits at the heart of that. It’s how you take a principle from biotech, overlay it on retail, remix it with logistics, and produce a new model. Associating is not random inspiration; it’s deliberate juxtaposition. The brain becomes a collision engine, not a filter.
Thinking differently isn’t optional. It’s the difference between being disrupted or being the disruption.
How Amazon Reimagined Retail
Amazon didn’t start with better inventory management. It reinvented catalogue retail, a structure from Sears, and merged it with computing power and logistics optimization.
Jeff Bezos associated mail‑order catalogue logic with nodes, demand forecasting, and infinite shelf space. He didn’t invent retail; he recombined it.
When everyone else stayed inside “store + shelf + checkout,” Amazon placed its bets on data + scale + network effect.
That associational leap let it pivot into AWS, Prime, streaming, and more. Same DNA. Reinvented model.
That’s thinking differently. Not incremental improvements. New problem spaces.
Thinking Mindsets and Innovation Gaps
Thinking skills matter, and the data proves it.
A 2024 meta‑analysis of organisational creativity and psychological safety (Lee et al., 2024) found that environments rated high on cognitive diversity and safe risk-taking score 25–30% higher in radical innovation output.
In a global innovation survey by BCG (2023), 79% of companies ranked innovation as a top 3 priority, but only ~25% said they felt structurally ready to deliver meaningful breakthroughs.
And in Innovator’s DNA longitudinal studies, companies excelling at associating and the other four discovery skills show outperformance in financial returns over peers for decades.
That means: even if 70–90% of your resources go into execution, you’ll underperform unless your thinking frameworks shift. The belief gap is real.
Questions That Force Mindset Audit
What unexpected industry have you borrowed ideas from this quarter?
When was the last time your team combined two unrelated concepts to solve a problem?
Which core assumption about your business model deserves to be challenged with an outsider’s logic?
What’s one idea you killed too quickly because it didn’t “fit” your usual way of thinking?
Are you refining old ideas, or actively remixing across domains to invent new ones?
Are you trying to build the future with yesterday’s thinking?
Build Your Associational Muscle
Week 1:
Collect one insight from an unrelated industry daily (art, biology, gaming). Log them. Force fit.
Week 2:
Create mini‑cards with prompts like “What if X handled Y?” or “Blend A with B.” Use them in ideation sessions.
Week 3:
Pose inverse problems: “How would I solve this if our resources were infinite?” or “What if the customer isn’t human?”
Week 4:
Express current problems as metaphors: e.g. “Our supply chain is a beehive.” Let teams remix.
Week 5–6:
Pair teams from different functions/industries to ideate for 1 week.
Week 7–8:
Pick 2 combinations and build lightweight mockups. Test them back in your context.
Where Ideas Go to Die or Live
Most companies aren’t crushed by better competitors. They’re crushed by the same thinking over time.
The winners? Those leaders who constantly rewire how they think, before they build.
If you’re tired of incremental tweaks and want your leadership team to break mental walls, start here.
🎯 Action: Drop one domain you never let cross-pollinate with your core business. I’ll decode how that association could kill or create your next growth engine.
Stop Letting Great Ideas Die in Meetings
90% of CEOs say innovation is a priority. Only 10% actually see results.
The gap isn’t ideas. It’s a leadership mindset.
That’s exactly why I created the Innovation Leadership Mastery program, an execution-focused, no-fluff experience designed for CXOs, founders, and transformation leaders who are done with theory and ready for results.
📍 Kuala Lumpur
🗓 November 5–6, 2025
🧠 Master the 5 Discovery Skills from The Innovator’s DNA
✅ HRD Corp Claimable
🚀 This is not about innovation labs or more brainstorming. It’s about rewiring how leaders think, decide, and drive disruptive ideas into execution.
If you’re ready to lead innovation, not just support it, this program is for you.
🔗 Comment below or DM me to get the registration link.