Evolution or Disruption?

My first day as a Facebook employee was in August of 2008. Exactly 17 years ago from this year's Trilogue. I wasn't particularly looking to join Facebook. At the time, it seemed smaller and less sophisticated than the broad church of Google/YouTube products that had attracted me to Silicon Valley during that era. Google's mission was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible," which felt meaningful and important, like cataloguing books in a library or curating a museum. But insiders tracking "the FB" – as we called it then – were bullish about the company's future. Mark Zuckerberg did have a visionary plan, they said; this was the future; and frankly, if an offer from Facebook knocks on your door without even applying … then what are you waiting for!

The next thing I knew, I was following a toga-clad Mark Zuckerberg down the streets of Palo Alto, California. In that moment, I questioned my career path. While the company was celebrating a major user-growth milestone which certainly warranted a celebration, why couldn't it be something more civilized, like a toast overlooking the skyline of a world-class city? How had I managed to avoid any college party involving a toga in my four undergraduate years, only to encounter one while following my CEO through the streets of Palo Alto?

Toga parties aside, there were other elements of late-2000s Facebook that didn't resonate with my upbringing. There were posters with bright red, bold lettering on the walls, and they were everywhere: MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS. Walking by these posters at Facebook's original graffiti-lined HQ, where the Communications and Public Policy team was based, felt like amateur hour. Everything about my upbringing and educational training was the opposite of moving fast to break things.

I was raised to learn, observe and absorb. I was taught to listen, ask questions and reflect. As a language major, we were endlessly inspired to see the world from every possible angle. We weren't allowed to bottom line. The world at its most sophisticated is filled with nuance and subtlety, layers and textures, opinions and counter-points. Why, even in the eighth grade, when I was 14 and a student in a Sacramento City Unified School District public school, we were taught to examine multiple accounts and narratives around key moments in US history before we came to our own opinions. Before jumping to conclusions, we were told, ask yourself if you'd considered all the evidence; consulted all potential experts.

Breaking things? How was that the recipe to a life well lived? I was raised to honor things. And so, at the time I was that new Facebook employee, I found those red-lettered posters jarring and unsettling. Respect, appreciation and intellectual rigor is not about wreckage, but about rhythm and harmony.

What is more, my first career aspiration – well before I went on to Princeton and built a career in corporate diplomacy – had been to become a horticulturalist. The thing about the natural world – about horticulture – is that it moves at the pace of evolution. There is no such thing as productive disruption in a garden. Seeds are planted. They are watered. Each morning before school during the spring season, I would race into the reliable morning California sun to check on my plantings, and days would go by with … nothing. Nothing but admiring a patch of dirt under which I had faith that something was happening. Then, one day, a green sprout! Oh the excitement. As the days lengthened, those delicate green sprouts would grow and grow and grow. And … eventually, they would become my herbs and flowers to cultivate over the long growing season. I always made sunflower houses – with the tallest sunflower stalks that towered above me as the walls, and hollyhock vines in beautiful blues and purples and pinks woven together to create the roof. My summertime garden was pure magic. But it didn't happen because I moved fast and broke things. It happened because I nurtured and kept the faith in the process. Its joy was all delayed – yet glorious – gratification. The gratification that nature programs us to thrive in. We can't conjure a summer day in January, but eventually the daffodils will peek out from behind the trees, and the tulips, the peonies, the hollyhocks, the lavender will follow.

Later – and long after my eight-year tenure at Facebook came to a close – I would serve as a policy advisor to the Minister of Tourism in Panama. At an event hosted at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC, we brought in a specialist in a field called "biomimicry" to deliver a presentation. It is no surprise that the Biomuseum in Panama City is a key draw for tourism. The country is, of course, at the point where the North American and South American continents converge. Biomimicry courses in Panama teach corporate leaders to understand how the rhythms of the natural world better inform outcomes than the artificial "efficiencies" that business schools so often preach. Nature is extraordinarily efficient, but it creates efficiency through smart evolution.

I thought back to the red posters at Facebook, and of all the decisions I had seen in my Silicon Valley years that could have benefitted from the biomimicry talk in Panama. So often, business leaders and the general tech-sector zeitgeist trains to disrupt as though disruption is the ultimate triumph. But we've made up this glorification of disruption with no real evidence that it actually works. In reality, the best revolutionary tech is a speeding of evolution, not a disruptive bomb. That's exactly what makes it so readily adopted. Once we went to Blockbuster to browse for films; then Netflix sent them to us in the mail (exciting!); then we accessed films through an on-demand app on our TV screens. That's how it works: winter, spring, summer, autumn.

It's the iPod to the iPhone, the letter to the email, the email to the WhatsApp conversation, Google Search to ChatGPT. How many times do we have to sit through yet another presentation about avatars and disruptive headsets to agree that these so-called disruptive ideas are actually, as Barbie would say when talking about Ken, "not cool"? The metaverse has been a flop not because it felt like a natural evolution of a successful technological innovation, but because it disrupted experiences to the point that we don't recognize our surroundings at all. Indeed, when technologies try to be too disruptive versus evolutionary, we sometimes even recoil from them. Landlines are having a comeback.

When technology evolves elegantly, seamlessly in a way that makes evolutionary sense, humanity embraces it. In truth, disruption is counter-intuitive to our species and the world around us. We are more in tune with humanity when we innovate from a place of evolution than from a place of disruption. Just ask a chef bringing a spicy style of cuisine to a culture of mild – even bland – palates, or a fitness coach at the gym. Start with the butter chicken, and make it really good. Then encourage the customers to add a bit of spice to it. You won't be doing push-ups like a Marine until you start lifting some weights. Everything is a process. With dedication and a stroke of creativity, that process surely can move quickly. But it's still a process.

And so, MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS always felt deeply flawed. Yet what I very quickly observed as a mid-20-something Silicon Valley insider, is that moving fast and breaking things was perceived as the golden ticket to growing billion-dollar market-cap companies. Disruption had somehow become a compliment, akin to achievement and success. The posters were unintentional, but still harmfully, a misleading sham. Long-term, it's not what broke things that built a leading, multi-billion dollar company. The breaking-things part brought the lawsuits and the reputational damage and the mental health and addiction crises we are still grappling with. It was the evolution of the physical Facebook to the digital Facebook that brought the success. That was the genius in it all. The Like button as a digital evolution of the thumbs up. The newsfeed that disrupted the platform without a warning to users was the disaster that caused a ripple effect of mistrust the company will never fully recover from, even today. An evolutionary approach – introducing people to the newsfeed idea, rolling it out as an opt-in feature, building in privacy guardrails – would have worked just as well and indeed instilled early on a culture of trust.

By 2011, I would move to London with the mandate to build Facebook's first Politics & Government division for the Europe, Middle East & Africa region as the company's first "Secretary of State." Transiting between two and three countries a week, from Denmark to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia to Egypt, the Netherlands to Nigeria, Montenegro to Moldova, Sweden to Saudi Arabia, I often asked myself what made Silicon Valley tech companies grow at such extraordinary scale. It wasn't the jolt of disruption. It was the pace of product and societal evolution. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google. Before it became the company it is today, Amazon made a name for itself by putting the selling of books online. During the Harry Potter era in the late 1990s and early 2000s, an entire generation of American kids waited eagerly on our front porches for the latest copy of J.K. Rowling's series to arrive. Receiving that cardboard Amazon box from a beaming UPS driver was the most exciting moment of a summer break. I still have mine. The rapid adoption of Amazon was more Wells Fargo Wagon than it was science fiction. Smart evolution.

Whether I was contemplating these issues on a flight from Oslo to Amman or while training government leaders in Dubai or Dublin, I became intensely aware that the "breaking things" mentality was harmful to the company and to society, while the West Coast mindset of embracing forward movement was compelling – even mesmerizing – to my constituents around the world. Like the impossibly long trains hurtling across the Great Plains that we observed from the windows in the back of our family's minivan as kids in the 1990s on road trips across America, momentum is a powerful concept. Movement. Saying yes. Driving forward. The momentum of an ecosystem involving finance and investment, product testing and innovation, brought the virality of evolutionary success. This entrepreneurial hustle is the equivalent of the train leaving the station. It is the long hours and the can-do and the imagination. The Top Gun-style "it's the only look I've got" mentality that comes with an entrepreneur's default programming. Californians don't question their ability to create. "California confidence" at its best is evolution at break-neck speed. Now that's something to bottle up and put on the shelf as a recipe for success. It's what is in the secret sauce of the culture. In the last 20 years, we've misleadingly attributed disruption and breaking things as the secret to California's success in the tech sector. But whether applied to the environment or to product development, disruption should never be the goal: Disruption is the risk to be mitigated, allowing the forces of evolution to flourish.

Case in point: Where California tech companies tend to lose the plot and cause more harm than good in their growth and reputational trajectories is when they disrupt rapidly, rather than evolve quickly but gracefully. In fields encompassing reputation management, West Coast leadership has a tendency to internalize the MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS poster, which is not helpful. In this regard, businesses ought to take a page out of a more alliance-led international playbook. In my 14 years in London, I was consistently impressed by the multitude of considerations that went into every decision. Before a Brit would speak, he would consider the points of view of the Qatari or the Sudanese in the room. Before a Dane would speak, she would consider the Israeli and the South African and the Swede. In a classic Silicon Valley conference room, questions were challenged and ideas articulated based on a scale that ranges from Microsoft in Seattle to YouTube in the San Francisco Bay Area. Occasionally, someone would say, "They won't like this in Berlin," and the collective energy in the room would shift to "Ugh. Well the team in Berlin can figure that out. Moving on." The famous early challenger to social media, Max Schrems, was initially dismissed because he was from … Austria. Had Max Schrems hailed from Georgetown, graduated from Stanford and lived in Los Angeles, he would have been taken more seriously. Overcomplicating every decision is often a classic flaw in creating and driving product vision. But when it comes to international corporate growth and expansion, everything rests on understanding how complex the real world is, and building an evolutionary plan around those realities through building trust, developing relationships and investing in reputation and diplomacy.

What I realized in my own first-hand experience is that Facebook's commitment to the religion of disruption rendered the broader corporate culture at the time incapable of considering the wider implications of its impact. MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS had become less an inspirational quote than a convenient excuse to dodge glaring challenges that were rising around it. In fact, the people closest to HQ often didn't realize what had been broken, and by the time they did, it was too late. Just imagine the power in a motto that sounded more like "Move Fast and Accelerate." It was the "breaking things" part – the bowing to disruption – that is problematic.

Of course, part of Facebook's story during this era will always be admirable. Thanks to Facebook, civil society leaders from Moldova to Ethiopia were able to get societal movements off the ground. We are connected to people from all walks of our lives. We start and grow small businesses. We remember our friends' birthdays. Yet reputationally, Facebook and its millions of users around the world would be in a better place today if the company had prioritized evolution over disruption. The disruptive mindset of tech executives in this era would eventually be forced to take a back-row seat when political and civil society leaders grappled with how social media-driven challenges were growing exponentially around them. An evolutionary mindset would have convinced investors earlier that funding well-trained teams to liaise with educators, police departments, emergency response units, policymakers and civil society leaders could help the incredibly ground-breaking technology fit into a flow of evolutionary progress – accelerated, but evolutionary – rather than upend it.

In making this claim, I am reminded of the American Revolution in the late 18th century – one of the most successful revolutions, achieving not only a new Constitution, but a country capable of extraordinary progress and global leadership. As Gordon Wood so eloquently discusses in his book The American Revolution, the path to the American Revolution was far from disruptive. It was revolutionary. American colonists didn't start their path to independence by burning every bridge and attacking every Redcoat in sight. They wrote letters. They remained loyal to the Crown and worked up theories for how to sustain the relationship with Great Britain while pursuing a distinct culture of their own. They developed their own values, priorities and way of life not overnight, but over time. They were loyalists to the Crown and turned – over an extended period of time – to building their own future on their continent. A select few hot-heads aside, the Founding Fathers were conservative and evolutionary in nature. And it worked. Evolution allowed for debate and thoughtfulness and introspection to play a role in the building of something truly transformative. Disruption enables a quick win, with a long tail of insurmountable challenges in its wake. It is the hit of dopamine that feels so good at the time, but comes crashing down. This is why so many revolutions fail.

Fast-forwarding to today, I cannot help but marvel at the lessons so many of today's leading Silicon Valley tech companies have learned in the last 20 years. The self-driving car company Waymo didn't suddenly go on the offensive in multiple cities around the world, taking on regulators and taxi unions and Uber drivers with abandon. Waymo has identified a carefully-selected number of cities to skillfully perfect its model, and in these locations has proven enormously successful with policy makers and customers alike. Other potential competitors look on with envy as they realize they have potentially missed the robotaxi boat and are now behind, but Waymo hasn't created its edge thanks to disruption … but to white-glove curated evolution. If you haven't been to San Francisco in a while, go. And you'll see what I mean. Waymo is everywhere, gliding elegantly and seamlessly into the daily lives of local residents. Miami, Atlanta and DC have welcomed Waymo with open arms, touting new opportunities to increase road safety and cut traffic, making American cities more livable. According to a Wall Street Journal article from May 31, 2025, the leading driverless car company is not succeeding "because Waymo is expanding into new markets. It's because of the way existing markets have come to embrace self-driving cars." Waymo is perfecting the technological change in a small number of highly-targeted cities, which means that if a consumer feels uneasy with technology that still feels foreign to the driving experience, concerns will be addressed.

The concept of driverless cars may sound disruptive, but the rollout is succeeding beyond all expectations because it is evolutionary. We compare that experience to Uber, which was of course wildly popular and ubiquitous in its day, but local tensions came at a cost. Taxi unions protested; locals railed against the rise of vehicles in their neighborhoods; the media found countless stories to scaremonger consumers about safety. By growing less like a bomb detonating in a metropolitan environment and more like a steady response to positive, evolutionary consumer demand, Waymo has clearly learned lessons from its predecessors, and is taking the evolutionary approach. No guerrilla warfare. No jarring market disruption. Elegant momentum. Just as progress should be – as nature designed it. Biomimicry.

It appears – therefore – that as much as we love to talk about disruption as the bedrock of the Silicon Valley success story, this thesis is both flawed and misguided. It is a myth. Facebook the product wasn't disruptive: It was the technological evolution of a physical book – the printed collegiate Facebook – brought online. The disruptive nature of the company was not the product. It was scale at all cost, which is still biting the company in the tail today. The scale would have come regardless of a ruthlessly disruptive corporate ethos, because the product was good and seamless and worked. If a Facebook user had a serious concern – a security breach, a shutting down of an account, a photoshopped use of their photos that harmed their safety and scared their family – there was no one to call. In other industries, this would be unacceptable. Disruption is earthquake, fire, volcano and flood. Evolution by definition is strategic and well governed. It is sunrise to sunset; caterpillar to butterfly; sapling to towering redwood. The good-governance that presides over evolution makes sense to our natural and cognitive capabilities. One of the greatest flaws of the technological age is to attribute positive qualities to disruption. Breakthroughs in technology must be accompanied by long-term, evolutionary thinking to be a net gain to consumers and to society in the long run.

This is why the impact of Facebook and social media writ large has been so hard to grapple with over time. The potential was always there. Once there was a time – and I was there – when it seemed that Facebook was on the side of democracy and positive connectivity and the race to the top for humanity. So why has social media felt so deflationary, so disappointing, so discouraging? Because the industry under-invested in shepherding along the evolution of it all. The social media story of the early 21st-century will go down as one of the greatest missed opportunities for technology to make the world a better place. No one is paying the price for this more than our young people.

At this point in my analysis of evolution versus disruption in the corporate sphere, it should be apparent that while some elements of a disruptive approach give companies a short-term market cap edge, my experience suggests that the social media era would have been as successful while also having a stronger positive societal impact by adopting an assertively evolutionary approach to its global expansion and growth. Reputationally, each of the social companies born in the mid 2000s would be in a stronger place today with a little more appreciation for biomimicry and a little less glamorization of breaking things.

Which brings us nicely to the recent world of politics. One entrepreneur's poster about breaking things is another entrepreneur's image of a chain saw, which will go down as one of the most iconic failures of what could have been an incredible movement in US politics. I am, of course, speaking of none other than DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, as spearheaded by Elon Musk, who has now dramatically broken off from Maga 2.0.

In principle, DOGE could have been an extraordinary success story. The reality is clear: At a certain point in any government's evolution, bureaucracy, spending and debt grow to a level that is no longer sustainable and become a threat to continued prosperity. Harnessing the skill set of the American tech sector to evaluate and source opportunities to increase efficiency wasn't the problem. In fact, one could argue that populating this team with businesspeople was a good idea. The problem was in the management, prioritizing disruption over strategic evolution. An executive was appointed to disrupt. No one was appointed to manage the evolution. In politics and governance – as in business – someone at the top needs to oversee the evolution of change, solving for momentum versus solving for breaking things.

If DOGE had started with a partnership and alliances team – well, we can only imagine! Here's the alternate narrative that could have been: Within the first 100 days of the Trump administration, while Elon Musk and his team are looking for efficiencies to hit their targets, the appointee responsible for evolution – let's call this individual the DOGE Diplomat – is putting together strategic partnerships with some of America's leading philanthropic organizations in areas set to be cut by USAID, the US State Department, and other organizations. The hypothetical message is clear: Whilst the current administration does not believe US taxpayer dollars should go to a certain swath of government-funded organizations, they are important, valid, impactful and meaningful. They are positive beacons of change. They should exist. And DOGE is signposting ways to contribute to these important programs that deserve success in the absence of US taxpayer support. An off ramp for these programs is created and communicated to the public. The DOGE Diplomat joins some of America's leading philanthropists and business leaders to lead a discussion on the roles of government, philanthropy and business in America's global soft power. Are some US government programs a questionable use of taxpayer dollars? Yes. Are these same programs empowering and important? Yes. Here's how the government can step aside and private and philanthropic sectors can step in: In tandem. Transition periods in place. A plan, and a sense of harmony, partnership, belonging and alliance. A thoughtful conversation on all the podcasts and network channels giving domestic and international partners hope that while DOGE is moving around the furniture, it is creating space for our nation to thrive in the 21st century. A beacon for addressing a serious fiscal concern.

The DOGE Diplomat approach, alongside business leaders laying out the urgent need to reduce the deficit, was all within the realm of possibility. It could have been a successful example of the public, private and third sectors working in partnership. What DOGE needed was to place itself within the evolutionary arc of governance, responsibility and respect for those it impacts. It needed a different kind of leadership at the helm to signpost the flock. We need the logic of evolution to more gracefully guide us to the star that will make our lives better. Instead, DOGE became a drama more akin to fragments of rockets meant for space swirling into the waters off the Florida coast. DOGE could have been a triumph of diplomacy. Instead, it is now a case study on the ineffectiveness of disruption. It needed a diplomat's polish and grace. It needed the biomimicry course in Panama.

This doesn't mean that the evolutionary approach – in business or in politics or indeed in art – needs to be slow and laborious. It can still be the train leaving the station, building the momentum, gaining speed as it accelerates. These are the moments when people jump on board, cheer on the forward progress, call their friends to tell them the next stop is in their home town. But it does need good leadership to navigate an evolutionary world. It needs stewardship and graciousness. We could draw parallels between other areas of our lives: When we check into a well-appointed hotel in a far-away country, we are put at ease by the reception we receive. Welcome to our country. We hope you have a wonderful stay. We are here to answer your questions. Evolutionary.

The same could be said for our educational upbringings. Kindergarten is meant to prepare us for primary school. University is meant to prepare us for the real world. It doesn't always work that way (though that's a different essay altogether!), but education is meant to be evolutionary.

Even a very good meal. In a well-curated restaurant, we don't dive into a steak within minutes of arriving at a restaurant. We enjoy a cocktail to settle into the atmosphere. We peruse the wine list, and indulge in conversation. We have a lighter dish as an appetizer. By the time we are enjoying a bold red wine and a steak, we are fully in the rhythm of the experience. A night cap packs a punch, but by then, we are ready for it. The Port wasn't poured when we walked in the door.

And in the arts, an accomplished artistic director will always introduce new, bold pieces into the repertoire. But every season, the company will intersperse the classics. A new, visionary production will be followed by Swan Lake or Giselle. Disruption is not the art: Elegant evolution is the art. It's the elegance of evolution that has driven successful society, culture, business and governance through the centuries. Disruption behind the scenes can tweak and push performance, but guidance through evolution is the only way to look after true progress, reputation and success. Indeed, the ultimate contemporary example of the success of artistic evolution would be the Taylor Swift "Eras" tour. Each shows an expression of evolution, from album to album through the years. Fans went wild. We humans pretend that we love disruption because the tech bros have told us that this is the thing that creates success, but by golly we feel at home in momentum-driven evolution. This is our biology at work. Evolution is both stimulating and comforting, exhilarating and nurturing. Evolution is enchanting.

My advice for any executive leader – whether corporate, governmental, cultural or philanthropic – is therefore this: No matter what your mission, product rollout or task at hand, appoint a leader to steward the evolution. We are accustomed to hearing about the role of the "Czar" for key so-called disruptive positions. This leader will usually have a tendency to unsettle. Couple that executive with a leader who masters the grace in our cellular programming, no matter how far into the 21st century we find ourselves. Balance the "Czar" with the "Diplomat." The leader who is tasked with selling and accelerating the mission while building the consensus, the partners and the alliances. It's that leader – the Diplomat – who is planting the bulbs that will bloom come spring.