Lighting the fire: the risky art of disruption

Imagine your company’s flagship product slipping behind in a race for novelty. A rival’s digital service is pulling ahead, and analysts predict a sharp drop in your market share. The classic playbook tells you to tighten operations, clarify roles, and get back to basics. 

Another option is to “raise the temperature” deliberately: you force new networks, challenge takenforgranted routines, and create variation on purpose. Then, once your engineered “heat” yields better ideas and behaviors, you cool the system to incorporate what you’ve learned. 

Much like a sword maker, you’ve just annealed your organization. Annealing thus involves “lighting a fire” under colleagues, observing their adaptations, and eventually locking in the gains. 

In recent research with Richard Haynes, Ingo Marquart, and Hai Anh Vu, I examined the process of annealing: purposefully heating an organization to bring forth new possibilities, then lowering the temperature to capture the gains. The aim isn’t chaos; it’s a temporary sacrifice of equilibrium in search of a better state. 

This article offers a practical framework: what annealing is, how to judge whether the necessary supporting conditions are in place, when to cool, and actionable steps you can take now. 

Annealing isn’t routine management 

In routine management, the priority is to cope with complexity and reduce uncertainty. Annealing inverts part of that logic: for a time, you harness – and even increase – uncertainty to force variation, and then you stabilize around what the heat reveals. Methods of annealing include heightening uncertainty by shortening deadlines, setting ambitious stretch targets, rotating responsibilities, or (partially) sketching the strategic goal while leaving the implementation path deliberately wide open. Colleagues react and you learn. Effective leaders thus switch in style between disruption and normalization, keeping in mind that heating for too long drains others’ emotional energy and erodes one’s own credibility. Put differently, annealing is a dual style: you’re disruptor and then stabilizer.

Two further contrasts clarify the distinctiveness of annealing. The first concerns risk versus uncertainty: Routine management operates where probabilities can be calculated, while annealing acts where probabilities defy estimation. Leaders heat to discover the path, then cool to settle into a domain of quantifiable risk. The second contrast relates to formal versus informal structure: Routine management works on the organizational “skeleton,” while annealing instead shocks the informal “central nervous system,” prompting new network configurations that make possible better ways of working. 

Realworld examples show the range. Micro example: Steve Jobs often “heated” teams through fierce critique that fueled intense debate, followed by reconciliation – through long walks that turned combatants into collaborators. Macro example: Jack Welch disrupted GE as a whole – each business had to be “#1 or #2” in its market, while many employees were fired. Welch later cooled through cultural renewal and leadership development. Jobs and Welch offer examples of annealing, not copyandpaste playbooks, however. Unlike many leaders, both would’ve likely scored well on all three dimensions to which I now turn. 

For reflection, not prescription

Before you heat, stress-test using these three reflection questions. Think of them less as boxes to tick and more as dimensions to consider. 

Status: Do you have robust credibility to lead through the heat?

• Crossnetwork esteem: Will an array of respected peers and distinct stakeholders vouch for you when tensions rise?
• Stickiness under strain: In recent uncertainty, did colleagues stay with you or drift away?
• Shielding capacity: If your performance dips temporarily, can you protect your exploratory work from outside interference?

Absent robust credibility, heating looks like flailing. Status both signals competence and supplies the social support needed to start – and sustain – annealing. Unintentional or addictive heating can erode status quickly. One careless cycle too many, and your status falls sharply. 

Emotional energy (EE): Are your colleagues starting from a vital foundation, or still fatigued from past shocks?

Once annealing begins, monitor:

• Attention quality: Are your colleagues creative and forwardlooking, or stuck in loops that sap their energy?
• Selfefficacy signals: Are they stepping forward with ideas, or retreating into compliance?

Heating without EE risks burnout or rebellion. Handled well, annealing can convert strain into shared accomplishment – raising vitality, focus, and confidence. That requires ongoing “temperature checks” and a willingness to cool sooner than planned. In practice, that often means pulling back earlier than you’d like.

Environment: Is there high market uncertainty and enough internal slack?

• Acute uncertainty: Tech shifts, sudden regulatory shocks, changing customer behavior – these can legitimate annealing, but ordinary volatility calls for more standard leadership.
• Intermediate coupling: You should be close enough to the external uncertainty to provoke search, but not so close that it distracts you.
• Slack resources: Time, budget, and allies inside your organization enable you to keep searching. 

Annealing is most readily justified when uncertainty is acute and resources allow search to run its course. An imbalanced mix of the two undercuts the effort. 

Putting ideas to work 

Watch out for unintentional annealing. Leaders sometimes “heat” unconsciously, offloading their own stress. When that happens, cool quickly to avoid the human equivalent of broken swords and shattered glass. Find ways to help the unintentional annealer to calm down. 

When annealing is intentional, value is captured in the cooling phase. In craft, artisans watch for the right moment and speed of cooling. In organizations, cues include a credible new direction, visible fatigue, or diminishing returns from further heat. Even if you’re not the initiator of the annealing process, you can watch for these cues and make the case for a return to order.  

Mini cases as guideposts, not recipes

If you think you may initiate an annealing process, consider these brief sketches: 

Jobs at Apple (micro): Seize attention → heated argument → cocreation → reconciliation → routinization. Jobs incited conflict, then relied on shared trust to make conflict exploratory, not draining. 

Welch at GE (macro): Shock → reveal → rebuild → institutionalize. “#1 or #2” plus layoffs produced a painful shakeup, followed by cultural reinforcement. A reframed “contract” – lifetime employability, not lifetime employment – helped cool the system, while preserving room for future annealing. 

Treat these as illustrative steps, not as rigid templates; combine – and dose – according to your context.

Annealing in practice

In many situations, an overall approach that privileges focus and stability is preferable to annealing. Routine management excels at reducing risk, ensuring compliance, and maintaining reliability. 

Even there, however, targeted annealing can help. Run small, bounded experiments that inject limited heat, then integrate what you learn. Track how energy, camaraderie, and credibility move; that data can inform your deliberations on whether to disrupt further. 

Use the preceding reflection questions to make sharper calls: assess status, energy, and environment; start an occasional fire when warranted; bound the heat; and cool at the right time. 

Annealing is a specialized tool for uncertain, knotty problems. When conditions aren’t right, standard management – and patience – is the wiser path. In favorable conditions, it can prompt renewal and even increase energy and credibility.