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Every tool on your desk today was once somebody’s awkward experiment. Somebody had to be seen using it first. What holds us back in trying new tools is the fear of looking and feeling foolish while using it.
This pattern with technology adoption is not new to us.
Every time you travel, you use a trolley bag? One that you easily drag around?? Before the 1970s we used to lug heavy trunks and suitcases in carriages and planes when we travelled. Back in the days, it showed strength and prestige to carry and have the big trunks carried. Then Bernard Sadow got tired of struggling to carry the weight of the bags and tried finding a better way. He fixed four wheels and a strap to a suitcase and took it to the big department stores. Stores turned him away. Their worry was the traveller. Carrying your own heavy bag was, as Sadow put it later, “a macho thing”. No one wanted to be seen pulling one along on a strap.
What changed it was not a better advertisement. In 1987 a pilot, Robert Plath, built an upright bag on two wheels and sold it to fellow crew. Travellers began to see pilots and flight attendants walking through airports with their bags rolling behind them. Nobody was laughing at them. Soon everybody wanted one!
Sometimes adopting early gets you in trouble too.
Remember Google Glass? It was developed by Google X in 2013. The small head mounted smart glasses cost 1,500 dollars to wear. Because the integrated camera pointed wherever the wearer looked, it raised massive privacy concerns regarding recording. They were given a rude nickname (Glasshole) that stuck. Bars and restaurants banned the glasses. Some wearers were heckled in the street. By early 2015 the glasses were pulled from public sale. Hardly anyone followed the early adopters.
Same pattern, both times. Everyone watches the first one. What happens to them decides who goes second.
Notice the patterns
The crowd was wrong about the suitcase. It had a fair point about the glasses, which carried a camera. Either way, the people watching were not judging the tool. They were judging what happened to the person who tried.
You possibly meet this pattern at your workplace too. Adoption spreads less through training than through what people see happen to the first person who tried. The colleague whose experiment failed in a client meeting and is now the team joke. The early user who became the unpaid helpdesk for everyone else.
The rest of us learn from watching them. Use the tool quietly and tell nobody. Do not ask the basic question in the training. Wait for another team to go first.
Laughed at or looked after?
How can you know what going first costs in your own team? Do people laugh at them? Are they looked after or do they simply get more work?
Here is a simple exercise. It needs no template. For one week, watch the jokes.
Listen for three things. What gets laughed at. Which stories get retold. What the new tool is called when the boss is not around.
Then look for three signs that the early ones are being snuffed out.
- The joke has a person’s name in it, and not the tool’s.
- The only story that gets retold is the one time it failed.
- The people who tried first have gone quiet about it.
If you are the boss, you will not hear any of this. Therefore ask someone you trust on what the team really thinks about the new tool / change when you are not in the room.
One caution.
This is listening, not policing. Stop the jokes and they will simply move to where you cannot hear them.
A team that laughs at a clumsy tool is a healthy team. It is when the laughter lands on a person that everyone else takes note and becomes wary of trying.
What does it cost to go first here? It is a harder question than asking how many people have logged in.
It is also the one that tells you if any one will follow and how your change adoption will fare! 🙂
