Disruption Theory. Sounds pretty ominous, doesn’t it? In 1995, a Harvard economist named Clayton Christensen published an article entitled “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave.”

In the article, he and his co-author put forward a new theory of business and technology that better tells the story of how companies adapt (or fail to adapt) to technological innovations. The theory goes something like this:

Company A is a small company with scarce resources. It takes existing technology and rearranges it in some innovative way. Initially, the innovation is too small and too obscure to be bothered with by bigger, more well-established companies. Company B, an industry giant, knows about the innovation but figures it won’t work, or company B can’t spare the resources to devote to such a small project; so, company B ignores the innovation.

Meanwhile, company A is working to perfect its innovation, which starts out pretty clunky and costly–and appeals only to a small emerging market. As company A gets better at innovation, company B starts getting worried and decides to go after the upscale portion of the market.

Company A continues to get better and better at its product, pushing Company B into smaller and smaller upscale markets–until one day, Company A overwhelms the industry titan, company B–pushing it further into irrelevance.

Ok. All that seems rather abstract for a Sunday morning. What does it mean?

Think about the mail. For a couple of centuries, standard mail was pretty much a monopoly. If you wanted to get information from point A to point B–where the distance was inconvenient to travel easily–you sent that information, for the most part, by mail.

That was a good system. It worked. It was stable and reliable. The post office seemed like an inevitability in the modern world.

Then came email. Remember that? It was a novelty.

“Have you got the electronic mail yet?”

It was pretty cool. It was fast. “But seriously,” people thought, “it’s so limited, so impersonal. It’s good for an occasional note, but you can’t do real business on it.”

The post office scoffed at the impact of this upstart technology … for a while, anyway. There was no real threat, they thought. The postal service was huge. It could do so many things well. Letter writing had been such a time-honored practice–necessary to the maintenance of a civilized society. No matter how convenient email is, we’d always need handwritten letters, right?

So, here’s the thing: When was the last time you sent a handwritten letter? Received a handwritten letter? Not a three-line thank-you note–a full-on letter?

See what I mean?

It was only a little over a decade before email displaced “snail mail” as the true workhorse of business correspondence.

When I started in ministry, I’d never even heard of email. All business correspondence went through the post office.

As it stands now, I email at a rate of about 1,000 to 1 over snail mail.

Then came texting and social media. People scoffed. It’s too short and too informal. It’ll never supplant email as a form of business correspondence.

Really?

After the country has been torn apart by political/social/sexual/economic/health divisions so profound that people have wondered if democracy will survive the onslaught of forces like social media.