Is Your Business Model Disruption-Ready? The 6 Questions Every Leader Should Be Asking

In 2023, I completed a doctoral research programme studying how 436 senior executives across India's TMT sector responded when disruptive forces hit their industries. The research covered firms across telecommunications, media, and technology — sectors that have experienced some of the most rapid and consequential disruption of the past decade.

The findings were stark. The majority of executives surveyed knew disruption was coming. They had read the analyst reports, attended the conferences, and commissioned the strategy presentations. What they had not done — what most organisations systematically fail to do — was translate that awareness into a structured, executable response before the disruption gained decisive momentum.

The result was a validated framework I call the Disruption Response Navigator (DRN) — a diagnostic tool that helps leadership teams assess their organisation's readiness to respond to disruptive forces before those forces become existential.

This article introduces the six core dimensions of the DRN framework and the diagnostic questions that every leadership team should be asking right now.

Why Most Disruption Responses Fail

Before examining the framework, it is worth understanding why disruption responses fail even when organisations see the threat coming. My research identified three primary failure modes.

The first is cognitive lock-in — the deeply embedded mental models that make it psychologically difficult for successful organisations to take seriously a technology or competitor that initially appears inferior or niche. The firms that dominated Indian telecommunications a decade ago did not fail to see mobile internet coming. They failed to believe it would displace their core revenue streams as rapidly as it did.

The second is structural inertia — the way that successful organisations build processes, governance structures, and incentive systems that are optimised for their existing business model. These same structures become barriers to the radical experimentation that disruptive response often requires.

The third is what my research termed capability displacement — the mismatch between the capabilities an organisation has built for its current competitive environment and the capabilities required to compete in the disrupted environment. This gap rarely closes through incremental improvement; it requires deliberate, often uncomfortable capability development.

The Six Dimensions of the Disruption Response Navigator

The DRN framework is built on six validated dimensions that together predict an organisation's readiness to detect, respond to, and benefit from disruptive change. Each dimension is assessed through a set of diagnostic questions — questions designed not to produce comfortable reassurance, but to surface genuine vulnerabilities.

Dimension 1: Environmental Sensing

The question is not whether you are aware that your industry is changing. Every executive in our research was aware of that. The question is whether your organisation has systematic, structured mechanisms for detecting weak signals before they become loud alarms.

Ask yourself: Do you have a process for monitoring not just your direct competitors, but adjacent industries where disruptive models are likely to originate? Do your sensing mechanisms include perspectives from outside your traditional industry boundaries? And critically — when a signal contradicts your current strategy, what happens to it?

Dimension 2: Strategic Ambidexterity

Disruption-ready organisations manage two strategic priorities simultaneously: exploiting their current business model for maximum value, while exploring new models that could replace or augment it. This is what researchers call ambidexterity, and it is genuinely difficult to achieve.

The diagnostic question: Does your organisation have dedicated resources — not borrowed from the core business — committed to exploring discontinuous opportunities? Or do innovation initiatives consistently lose out to the urgent demands of the existing business?

Dimension 3: Dynamic Capabilities

Dynamic capabilities — the ability to sense opportunities, seize them quickly, and reconfigure resources accordingly — were the strongest predictor of effective disruption response in my research, explaining a substantial portion of the variance in organisational outcomes.

The diagnostic question: When your organisation identifies a significant market opportunity, how long does it typically take from identification to resource commitment to active pursuit? If the answer is measured in quarters rather than weeks, your dynamic capability profile is a vulnerability.

Dimension 4: Leadership Cognition

The mental models of the leadership team — their beliefs about how the industry works, who the relevant competitors are, and what customer value looks like — are among the most powerful determinants of how an organisation responds to disruption. And they are among the most difficult to change.

The diagnostic question: When was the last time your leadership team was seriously challenged by a perspective that fundamentally questioned your current strategic assumptions? Not politely questioned them in a presentation, but genuinely disrupted the mental models of the senior team?

Dimension 5: Stakeholder Ecosystem Alignment

Disruptive response rarely succeeds in isolation. It typically requires the cooperation — or at minimum, the non-obstruction — of key stakeholders: investors, board members, key customers, suppliers, and employees. Organisations whose stakeholders are deeply invested in the existing business model face structural resistance to the pivots that disruption requires.

The diagnostic question: If your organisation needed to make a significant strategic pivot in the next 12 months, which stakeholders would be your allies, which would be neutral, and which would actively resist? Have you mapped this honestly?

Dimension 6: Governance and Decision Velocity

Disruption does not wait for the next board meeting. The speed at which your organisation can make and implement significant strategic decisions — decision velocity — is a critical competitive variable in disrupted environments. Organisations with slow, consensus-heavy governance structures are systematically disadvantaged in responding to fast-moving disruption.

The diagnostic question: What is the fastest your organisation has ever moved from identifying a significant competitive threat to implementing a substantive response? Is that speed achievable today? Or has the organisation grown in ways that have slowed decision-making without those costs being explicitly acknowledged?

What to Do With Your Answers

The purpose of the DRN framework is not to generate a score. It is to generate an honest conversation among your leadership team about the specific dimensions where your disruption readiness is weakest — before those weaknesses are exposed by a competitor or a market shift.

In my experience, most leadership teams find one or two dimensions where their honest assessment is significantly weaker than their public posture would suggest. Those are the dimensions that deserve immediate, focused attention.

The organisations that survive disruption are not those with the best products or the strongest balance sheets. They are the organisations with the most honest self-assessment, the most adaptive leadership, and the most deliberate disruption response systems. Building those systems is the work of today — not after the disruption arrives.

Dr. Sanjeev Menon holds a Doctorate in Business Administration with research focused on incumbent firm responses to disruptive innovation. His DBA research surveyed 436 senior executives across India's TMT sector, producing the Disruption Response Navigator (DRN) framework. He is the Managing Director of PositivEnergy Consulting (PEC) and Visiting Faculty at MIT Vishwaprayag University. To apply the full DRN diagnostic to your organisation, contact PEC at reach@positivenergy.in.