The Power of Disrupters: Why Progress Never Comes From the Middle

Daniel Davies, CEO, Rockpoint Leisure

There is a strange habit we have in Britain when it comes to disruption.

We celebrate it retrospectively, once it has been sanitised, professionalised, and safely folded into a case study or keynote slide. We like mavericks when the rough edges have been filed down and the outcomes are no longer in doubt. While disruption is actually happening, though — while it is noisy, awkward, human and inconvenient — we tend to mistrust it.

We question motives. We conflate challenge with recklessness. We treat friction as failure rather than as evidence that something important is being tested.

This is not a moral failing. It is a systemic one. Large systems, whether commercial, civic, or political, are designed to preserve themselves. They optimise for continuity, not rupture. They reward consensus, not challenge. Which is precisely why meaningful progress almost never comes from the middle.

Disruption, when it works, always has a human face. It arrives embodied. It comes in the form of people who refuse to accept that the current shape of things is inevitable — who see constraints as provisional, habits as negotiable, and rules as artefacts rather than laws of nature.

This is a piece about that face. About disrupters. About why they matter. About why they are so often misunderstood. And about why, without them, nothing meaningful ever moves forward.

I want to use Daniel Davies — as a figurehead here. Not because he is perfect. Not because he is universally liked. But because he embodies the pattern. The kind of person who shifts systems simply by refusing to accept the limits they are told are immovable.

Disrupters are often lazily described as contrarians. As people who enjoy conflict for its own sake, or who mistake volume for substance. In reality, the most effective disrupters tend to be something else entirely.

They are system readers.

They are acutely sensitive to inefficiency, misaligned incentives, and the gap between what organisations say they value and how they actually behave. They notice where process has drifted away from purpose. Where policy imagines rational actors and real life stubbornly refuses to comply.

Behavioural science gives us a useful lens here. Humans do not respond to stated intentions; they respond to defaults, incentives, friction, and social cues. Systems decay not because people are malicious, but because nobody feels enough discomfort to challenge the direction of travel.

Disrupters feel that discomfort early — and intensely.

This is where Rory Sutherland’s work is particularly instructive. His repeated warning against treating every problem as an engineering challenge applies perfectly here. When organisations obsess over optimisation, they tend to optimise the wrong thing. They improve the efficiency of systems that no longer serve their purpose instead of asking whether the system itself needs redesigning.

Disrupters instinctively ask that second question. Not “how do we make this work better?”, but “why does this exist in this form at all?”

That question creates friction. And friction is rarely welcomed.

Why large organisations secretly need people they publicly resist

I’ve spent over twenty years working with global brands. Big ones. Complex ones. Organisations with layers of governance, risk management, procurement, and legal review.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: large organisations are structurally biased against change. Not because they are stupid. Because they are successful. Success creates habits. Habits become process. Process becomes doctrine. And doctrine eventually becomes untouchable.

The brands that genuinely change categories — not just incrementally improve them — nearly always do so by listening to internal or external disrupters they initially tried to ignore.

Think about the brands that actually rewired behaviour rather than just marketing it:

• They challenged defaults instead of messaging intentions.

• They redesigned friction instead of blaming consumers.

• They reframed value instead of discounting price.

None of that comes from the middle of the bell curve.

Disrupters don’t ask, “How do we optimise this?” They ask, “Why does this exist like this at all?”

Which is precisely why they cause friction — and precisely why they matter.

Daniel Davies is often framed too narrowly. As a training provider. As a licensing figure. As a hospitality operator. All of those labels are accurate — and all of them miss the point.

What Davies actually represents is a particular kind of applied disruption: grounded, operational, and behaviourally literate.

He founded CPL Training Group in 1991 and grew it into one of the UK’s leading providers of licensing and hospitality qualifications by professionalising a sector that had long been fragmented and under-structured. He did not do this by politely conforming to inherited norms, but by challenging how standards, accountability, and competence were defined in the first place.

As Chairman of the Institute of Licensing, he has spent years working directly with regulators, policymakers, and local authorities — often pushing against comfortable assumptions about how licensing, town centres, and night-time economies actually function. Crucially, he does this from the position of someone who has worked on the ground, in venues, in hospitality, in the lived reality that policy frequently abstracts away.

That grounding matters. Behavioural realism matters.

It is also why his contributions to national discussions — including giving evidence to House of Lords select committees on seaside town regeneration — land with weight. They are not theoretical. They are friction-aware. They are system-literate.

And yes, that sometimes makes him difficult. Disrupters usually are.

Regeneration fails when it ignores behaviour

I’ve watched countless regeneration initiatives falter because they focus on surface optics rather than behavioural mechanics.

They talk about vibrancy but design spaces people don’t want to inhabit. They talk about community but create processes no community member would realistically navigate. They talk about growth while adding friction at every decision point.

Behavioural science would describe this as intention–action gap failure. Disrupters spot this instinctively.

Danny’s involvement in projects like Rockpoint Leisure in New Brighton isn’t about nostalgia or vanity. It’s about reintroducing functional reasons for people to return, stay longer, spend locally, and feel ownership of place.

That’s not romantic. It’s behavioural economics applied to geography. You don’t regenerate towns by announcing visions. You regenerate them by changing defaults.

When national institutions listen — and local ones don’t

One of the clearest illustrations of how disrupters are recognised at the wrong level comes from the House of Lords Select Committee on Regenerating Seaside Towns and Communities.

In its 2019 report The Future of Seaside Towns, the Committee singled out New Brighton — specifically the Victoria Quarter project — as a regeneration model worthy of serious attention. This was not a passing reference or a token anecdote. An entire section of the report examines the approach in detail and treats it as an example of how seaside regeneration can work when it is grounded in behaviour, incentives, and long-term thinking.

Daniel Davies appears in the report not as a commentator on the sidelines, but as an active investor and system-shaper. His evidence, submitted both orally and in writing, emphasised principles that behavioural science would immediately recognise as sound:

• regeneration that is not dependent on seasonality alone

• the deliberate clustering of independent businesses to create mutual reinforcement

• the night-time economy as an anchor rather than an afterthought

• long planning horizons measured in decades, not electoral cycles

• culture and hospitality as behavioural infrastructure, not cosmetic branding

The Committee explicitly endorsed this framing. It supported long-term planning, private investment working alongside public backing, and locally distinctive offers over generic seaside solutions. It noted early reductions in antisocial behaviour, increases in footfall, job creation, and renewed civic pride as signals of success.

In other words, at the highest level of government scrutiny, this approach was not dismissed as risky or eccentric. It was recognised as credible, replicable, and strategically coherent.

And yet this is where the pattern becomes instructive.

That same thinking has often struggled to gain consistent traction at local authority level. Not because the evidence is weak, but because the institutional incentives are misaligned. Local systems carry political exposure without insulation, process without permission to redesign it, and risk without reward. The result is caution masquerading as responsibility.

This gap — between national recognition and local hesitation — is precisely where disrupters operate. They sit in the uncomfortable middle where ideas are validated in principle but resisted in practice.

Changing that mindset is not about shouting louder. It is about redefining what responsibility actually means. In regeneration, responsibility does not mean avoiding disruption. It means understanding that without it, decline simply continues — more quietly, more politely, and far more expensively.

The pattern is consistent — across business, culture, and leadership

When you strip away personality, tone, and style, disrupters share a common function:

• They make invisible constraints visible.

• They reveal that many so-called “limits” are social, not structural.

• They remind institutions that rules are designed — and can be redesigned.

From entrepreneurs who redefine categories, to civic leaders who challenge complacency, to operators like Danny who refuse to accept inherited dysfunction as inevitable — progress follows the same behavioural arc.

First they are ignored. Then they are resisted. Then they are criticised. Then — eventually — they are quietly copied.

Why we should get better at recognising disrupters earlier

If there is a failure here, it’s not individual. It’s cultural.

We are poor at distinguishing between destructive noise and productive disruption. We conflate discomfort with danger. We mistake consensus for wisdom.

The irony is that many organisations actively hire people for “innovation” while structurally neutralising anyone who genuinely threatens existing models.

Disruption is not neat. It doesn’t arrive with a slide deck and a sign-off process.

It arrives as a problem.

Daniel Davies represents that pattern. Not as a hero. Not as a villain. But as a necessary irritant in systems that would otherwise calcify.

If we want progress — in business, in towns like New Brighton, in national policy — we need to get more comfortable with people who make us uncomfortable for the right reasons.

Because history is clear on this point: Nothing important ever changes from the middle.

And on that note, it’s worth saying plainly: thank you, Dan. For the investment, the graft, the stubbornness, and the bold, disruptive vision. Without it, much of what New Brighton has regained in recent years simply wouldn’t exist. RW