The 3 Orders of Change. Innovation, Disruption & Realities
In ‘If not this, then what?’, we don’t talk about innovation or even disruption. We talk about realities.
But we don’t mean reality as a metaphor or some vague, plausible future scenarios. We mean actual systems—total environments—made up of rules, logics, relationships, and assumptions that feel immutable… until they aren’t.
We have chosen ‘Reality’ as our word. Because the other words no longer feel enough.
The Three Orders of Change
Most people talk about change as if it’s one thing and everyone is talking about the same thing. But in our work, we kept noticing a pattern: not all change produces the same effects.
Some changes tweak a product. Others shake up a market. But a rare few go deeper: they rewire the very logic of how the world works. That’s why we began to distinguish between three orders of change. Not in increasing order of importance but more in increasing scale of ambition. Each order shifts a different part of the system—and demands a different kind of thinking.
First-Order Change: Innovation
This is the domain of improvements.
A better camera. A faster processor. New features in the next iOS release.
These are not meaningless—they’re incremental and useful. But they operate entirely within the current reality. They’re often planned well in advance, tied to clear timelines, and can be reversed if needed. They live comfortably within roadmaps and marketing plans, and their success is measured in metrics that already make sense to the system.
Their purpose is to “up” a product or service—to polish, optimize, extend. They don’t provoke a fundamental rethinking of what the thing is.
Second-Order Change: Disruption
This is where the attention has been for the last couple of decades. It’s what many pursue.
Think of Apple stepping into the music industry, or Tesla designing cars with a completely different drivetrain logic. These moves shift the positioning of a player. They can send ripples through industries, reordering who wins and who loses.
Second-order change is harder to plan. It carries more uncertainty. It doesn’t always have product-market fit from the start, and once launched, it’s difficult—and often costly—to pull back from. These are the shake-ups we call breakthroughs or paradigm shifts. And you probably have noticed that these days, everyone wants to be a disruptor.
But even these disruptions tend to stay within the boundaries of the existing reality. A Tesla is still a car. The iPhone, at launch, was still a phone (albeit with music-playing capabilities). They may flip the board, but it’s still the same game.
Third-Order Change: New Realities
This is a much rarer form of change, and the most consequential. It’s the emergence of a new reality. Not a better product. Not a different player. But an altered logic of how the world works.
To understand what we mean, consider the iPhone again. Yes, it began as a phone. But over time, its true transformation was not in hardware specs—it was in what it made possible, and what it made obsolete.
Phones, once used primarily for calls, now serve as constant companions. They host an entire ecosystem of apps that mediate our every behaviour—from commuting to dating to managing chronic illness. They created new social networks, new markets for attention, and entire industries around data prediction and behaviour design. They haven’t just changed how we communicate. They’ve changed what we expect communication to be.
This is a new reality. And what defines it is not a launch date or a marketing plan. New realities happen gradually. They cannot be launched. They unfold…revealing themselves as we let go of the old reality.
“Where first-order change ‘ups’ the product, and second-order change ‘ups’ the player, third-order change reshapes the playing field. ”
How to Know You’re in the Territory of a New Reality
Here’s how the properties shift:
This is why we say: Innovation is for products. Disruption is for players. Reality is for how your world works.
Why Most Big Ideas Get Watered Down
If you’ve tried to drive serious change inside an organisation, you’ve likely gone through something like this:
You propose something bold. Visionary. Something that actually makes sense for the world we’re becoming. And then:
• You’re asked to “align” with some other department.
• The marketing team wants numbers.
• The legal team wants guardrails, disclaimers, contracts, and exclusivity agreements.
• Everyone wants it to “fit” the current system.
And so bold ideas get trimmed. New logics get sanded down until they resemble old ones.
Radical potential is made palatable—and ultimately forgettable.
This is a structural failure, not a creative one.
You cannot build a new reality while still conforming to the rules of the old one.
Once you accept that radical new realities will always look impossible from the inside of the current one, you start designing very differently. With clarity and courage. And less compromise.
We think that most people believe, like us, that the real need in today’s world isn’t for building better features. It’s about learning how to question—and ultimately leave behind—the structure of the present.
That’s what the book is about. A way to break the spell of the familiar. A method for tracing, inverting, and reconstructing the foundations of what’s considered possible.
If you feel like you’re dealing with a reality where minor improvements won’t cut it and even the word ‘disruption’ feels dated, you should read the book.
It’s written for you.
