Everybody wants disruption. Nobody wants troublemakers.

But here is the truth, my friends: the two are the exact same thing. Listen, we all love the idea of shaking things up, right? We talk about it in the boardroom. We put it on our vision boards. But the moment things get a little uncomfortable, the moment the room doesn’t look, sound, or think like us… we retreat. We want to keep things nice and cozy up in here. But let me tell you something I have learned as Grammy Nominated Spoken Word Artist Sekou Andrews: comfort is the silent killer of growth.

I don’t just stand on stages to entertain; as a motivational poet, my job is to help you clear out those limiting beliefs stuck in your throat. And one of the biggest limiting beliefs in business today is that high performance comes from a room full of people who all nod at the exact same time. No! Diversity is disruptive. It is supposed to be disruptive. If you want to build the most resilient, most inspirational teams on the planet, you have to prepare for what you cannot predict. And you cannot do that if everybody in the room shares the exact same blind spots.

Here are five reasons why you need to stop hiring for comfort and start hiring for combustion.

1. You are trapped building the “Banana Pancake” team.

We all love banana pancakes, right? Safe. Sweet. Comfortable. But if you only ever hire banana pancakes, your palate never grows. Homogenous cultures lead to homogenous teams that reinforce homogenous decisions. When you rely solely on your immediate network, you fall into the trap of “birds of a feather.” Like attracts like. To build a leading enterprise, you have to be bold enough to pass on building yet another banana pancake team and go build the pulled pork and grilled plantain panini team. You need the collision of perspectives to wake up your industry.

2. True innovation requires the “Chocolate and Chipotle” collision.

You ever tasted a dish so completely foreign on your tongue that it just wowed you? Chocolate and peanut butter is awesome. You can eat it all the time and be completely comfortable. But the first time you taste chocolate and chipotle, you’re like, “What is this?!” It’s poetry on your tongue. As a spoken word artist, I know that the most powerful art comes from mixing things that shouldn’t belong together. You have to be the chocolate chipotle of industry change. Tell white chocolate to go work with caviar! Get blood orange in a room with ginger! High performance energy does not come from comfort. It comes from collision.

3. You must prepare for what you cannot predict.

I read a Harvard Business Review study about carpenters trying to create better respiratory masks. They asked other carpenters for ideas—got decent ones. They asked roofers—got better ones. Then they went way outside their lane and asked inline skaters. And boom! They got the most radical, innovative ideas from people who had nothing to do with their industry. The more distant the field, the more novel the ideas. You cannot predict the next market shift, but you can prepare for it by surrounding yourself with minds that don’t operate on your frequency. Forget the quick dopamine hit of a scrolling instapoetry quote; you need the deep, disruptive, genre-bending thinking of a true spoken word mindset to see the unseen.

4. You forgot how to pick the dodgeball team.

Everything I need to know about hiring for my company, I learned on the fifth-grade playground. When it was my turn to pick the dodgeball team, the standard protocol was to pick the biggest, most obvious kids. But one day, desperate to win, I picked the scrawniest kid on the playground—Yvonne. And let me tell you, we went on a five-week winning streak led by our new MVP, who became affectionately known as “Yvonne the Arm.” Sometimes you have to step outside of what you’ve always done in order to find who you’ve always had. If you want to be the world’s best, you cannot just look for the top candidate on paper. You have to sniff out the best talent in the most unexpected places.

5. You have to yes-and yourself into the uncomfortable.

Disruption is kind of a jerk. It is rude. It is relentless. It doesn’t RSVP. So the only way to beat disruption to its destination is to embody disruption yourself. As the most inspiring leaders know, you have to create a safe space for your team to fail forward. You have to embrace the foundational rule of improv: “Yes, and.” When a completely foreign, diverse perspective is thrown at you, you don’t shut it down. You say, “Yes, and watch where I take it. Yes, and watch how I transform it.” That is how you stop managing change and start making waves.

The Ultimate ROI of Disruption

Let’s not just talk about it, let’s be about it. It is time to ecosystem yourself. To stop trying to be the smartest person in a room full of people who think exactly like you, and start being the braver person in a room full of brilliant differences.

As a spoken word poet, I don’t write to keep you comfortable. I write to move you. And as leaders, you must do the same. So let this be the moment you lock pinkies with your own potential. I challenge you to be a vanguard artist in your own field. Use the disruptive power of spoken word poetry, of storytelling, of radical inclusion, to build a culture where everyone feels seen, heard, and challenged. Because when you finally embrace the beautiful, messy, chipotle-level heat of true diversity… oh, my friends. Grammy Nominated Poet Sekou guarantees you: up is the only direction you will grow.