IT training guidelines for keeping pace with innovation and tech adoption khotailieu

Guidelines for Keeping Pace
with Innovation and
Tech Adoption

How to Respond When Competition,
Your Customers, and Automation
Come Knocking

Esther Schindler

Beijing

Boston Farnham Sebastopol

Tokyo


Guidelines for Keeping Pace with Innovation and Tech Adoption
by Esther Schindler
Copyright © 2017 O’Reilly Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA
95472.
O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use.
Online editions are also available for most titles ( For more
information, contact our corporate/institutional sales department: 800-998-9938 or


Editor: Laurel Ruma

Production Editor: Nicholas Adams
Copyeditor: Rachel Monaghan
December 2016:

Interior Designer: David Futato
Cover Designer: Randy Comer

First Edition

Revision History for the First Edition
2016-11-18:

First Release

The O’Reilly logo is a registered trademark of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Guidelines for
Keeping Pace with Innovation and Tech Adoption, the cover image, and related trade
dress are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc.
While the publisher and the author have used good faith efforts to ensure that the
information and instructions contained in this work are accurate, the publisher and
the author disclaim all responsibility for errors or omissions, including without limi‐
tation responsibility for damages resulting from the use of or reliance on this work.
Use of the information and instructions contained in this work is at your own risk. If
any code samples or other technology this work contains or describes is subject to
open source licenses or the intellectual property rights of others, it is your responsi‐
bility to ensure that your use thereof complies with such licenses and/or rights.

978-1-491-97412-4
[LSI]

Table of Contents

Guidelines for Keeping Pace with Innovation and Tech Adoption: Don’t
Just Fail Fast—Learn Fast. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
You Say “Disruptive” As If It’s a Good Thing
Evaluating the Options
Coping with Change

2
9
23

iii



Guidelines for Keeping Pace with
Innovation and Tech Adoption:
Don’t Just Fail Fast—Learn Fast

There are two kinds of fool. One says, “This is old, and therefore good.”
And one says, “This is new, and therefore better.”
—Dean Inge

New products, services, and methodologies clamor for our atten‐
tion. All of them promise to make our lives easier, to help our teams
become more productive, and to give our companies more opportu‐
nity to make money. Some might even be telling the truth.
We all have guessed about when to climb on board with a new tech‐
nology, hot product, lauded programming language, or other hyped

item touted as the latest-and-greatest innovation. Even when the
item truly is exciting, adopting it is a risk no matter what size of
business you run or where you stand on the corporate ladder. If you
commit too soon, you may discover that the innovation doesn’t
measure up to its promises, and its failures screw things up for your
own projects. If you jump on board too late, after your competitors
adopt the innovation and work out all the kinks, your organization
may find itself playing catch-up.
This is an age-old problem. A hundred years ago, businesspeople
argued about whether it was the right time to get rid of horse-drawn
conveyances and invest in those newfangled delivery trucks. But
they had more time to contemplate the options. These days, the pace
of change is so fast that it’s hard to learn what an innovation is,
much less make a sensible decision about the right time to adopt it.
1


It’s not like you have a choice, really. Things are changing all around
us, and we (as individuals and businesses) have to respond, one way
or another.
“All organizations change, regardless of whether employees are ‘pre‐
pared and ready,’” says Kirsten Osolind, senior VP at strategy and
innovation consulting firm Reinvention Consulting. “You need to be
on a constant quest to wrestle new efficiencies from existing assets.
You need to surf waves of opportunity. You need to run at the right
speed, in the right direction.”
Fortunately, useful guidelines can help us make the “right item, right
time” decisions, and assist in the integration of the new technology
into existing business processes. These suggestions may aid you in
recognizing when and how to implement a technology change.

You Say “Disruptive” As If It’s a Good Thing
In the late 1980s, I was president of a tiny computer user group in
rural Maine. We decided to put on a computer faire—the techie
equivalent of “My dad has a barn; let’s put on a show!”—which ulti‐
mately drew about 1,000 people. For a rural coastal community with
a traffic light every 40 miles, that’s a lot.
I asked Pete Petersen, the vice president of WordPerfect Corpora‐
tion, to be our keynote speaker, in hopes that the guy running the
business for the market-leading word processor would be willing to
talk to us. To my delight, Petersen said yes, even accepting my ohso-naïve topic suggestion of prognosticating the future of comput‐
ers. I remember his predictions to this day.
“I can’t tell you what future computers are going to look like,”
Petersen said. “But I can tell you this: they’ll be smaller, cheaper,
faster, quieter, and more powerful.”
And he was right. Nearly every technology change in the past 30
years has fallen into one of those categories. We appreciate anything
that’s “smaller, cheaper, faster, quieter, and more powerful,” whether
those qualities apply to a speedier personal computer, a more effi‐
cient software development process, an RFID chip that communi‐
cates useful data across a network, or a SaaS application inexpensive
enough for a small business to afford.

2 | Guidelines for Keeping Pace with Innovation and Tech Adoption: Don’t Just Fail Fast—
Learn Fast


When changes are gradual, they’re easy to weave into “business as
usual” methodologies. It doesn’t cause much stress to replace an
aging computer with a faster model, and you get little corporate

pushback if you suggest a tweak to “the old way of doing things.”
But when we talk of innovation, often we refer to something really
new.

The Technology Adoption Curve
Human improvement isn’t always a single moment of discovery in
which an entire worldview changes. Those who study the creative
process of innovation distinguish between incremental enhance‐
ments and true game changers. Clayton Christensen’s The Innova‐
tor’s Dilemma (Harvard Business Review Press, new edition 2016)—
which has a terrific four-minute video summary—calls these sus‐
taining innovations, improvements to “the way we’ve always done it”
and disruptions, unexpected changes to existing systems that rede‐
fine a problem as well as the solution. Everyone was looking for a
better iron lung; instead, Jonas Salk invented the polio vaccine. Steve
Jobs cited Henry Ford as saying, “If I had asked people what they
wanted, they would have said faster horses”; even if the attribution is
inaccurate, the sentiment is not.
Not every disruption is a technology disruption, the way that a new
CPU or medical breakthrough might be. Sometimes the change is a
business model or a methodology. MP3 music players were around
for a while, as an expensive lackluster wannabe product category, a
problem looking for a solution. Then the iPod got it right. With a
different business model, Apple integrated hardware, software, and
services; it created both happy consumers and a technological, musi‐
cal, and social juggernaut.
Disruption sounds like a marvelous thing when you’re the entrepre‐
neur doing the disrupting. It means your business is doing some‐
thing truly unique (and, one hopes, profitable) to which other
organizations must attempt to measure up. That’s been true for

ecommerce, Uber, phone cameras, Software as a Service (SaaS),
social media, and dozens of other revelatory technology and busi‐
ness model changes.
If you run a business, though, disruption is a bad word. It means
shaking up the status quo, often with an uncertain outcome. Not
everyone wants to be disrupted; most leaders are content to be bor‐
You Say “Disruptive” As If It’s a Good Thing

|

3


ingly productive, profitable, and business-as-usual. Disruptions are
time-consuming distractions, at best.
This topic was deeply explored by Everett Rogers, a professor of
communication studies, in his book Diffusion of Innovations (Free
Press, 1962), and later cited at length by Geoffrey A. Moore in Cross‐
ing the Chasm (HarperCollins, 1991). They summarized the technol‐
ogy adoption life cycle by identifying several classes of buyers and
users (that would be you):
Innovators (2.5% of the population, according to Rogers)
The first to adopt an innovation, these people often pursue new
products aggressively, while the products are still in develop‐
ment. Technology is a central interest in their lives, and their
endorsement means a lot to those who follow. These people take
risks, they are willing to put up with fewer product features
because of the promise of more to come, and they accept that
some bright ideas fail.
Early adopters (13.5%)

Early adopters adopt the innovation when it’s still new, but no
longer raw. They are tech-literate influencers whose opinions
shape others’ decisions. They can imagine, understand, and
appreciate a new technology’s benefits and relate them to other
concerns. But, as with the innovators, early adopters are willing
to accept imperfections in the short term because they see
where the innovation is heading.
Early majority (34%)
The entry point to the mainstream, these people share some of
the early adopter’s ability to relate to technology. But, cautions
Moore, ultimately they are driven by a strong sense of practical‐
ity. “They want to see well-established references before invest‐
ing substantially,” he wrote. “Because there are so many people
in this segment—roughly one-third of the whole adoption life
cycle—winning their business is key to any substantial profits
and growth.”
Late majority (34%)
This group approaches change with a high degree of skepticism,
usually after the innovation has been accepted in their society.
“They wait until something has become an established stan‐
dard,” writes Moore, and they tend to buy from large, well-

4 | Guidelines for Keeping Pace with Innovation and Tech Adoption: Don’t Just Fail Fast—
Learn Fast


established companies. (Or, as my mom used to say, “If it’s so
great, why isn’t everybody doing it?”)
Laggards (16%)
Laggards are change averse, and prefer familiarity and tradition.

(Get off my lawn!)
Moore’s chasm theory was mind-blowing when it was first expoun‐
ded because he emphasized the wide gulf—that chasm—between the
early adopters and mainstream buyers. In guiding entrepreneurs on
how to cross the divide, Moore went into detail about identifying
target markets, product positioning, building a marketing strategy
for each type of adopter, and choosing the most appropriate distri‐
bution channel and pricing.
Christensen, Moore, and Rogers spoke primarily to and for the
entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and technology early adopters—
the people who shape so much of what the future looks like. For
example, “Characteristics of disruptive businesses, at least in their
initial stages, can include: lower gross margins, smaller target mar‐
kets, and simpler products and services that may not appear as
attractive as existing solutions when compared against traditional
performance metrics,” wrote Christensen. “Because these lower tiers
of the market offer lower gross margins, they are unattractive to
other firms moving upward in the market, creating space at the bot‐
tom of the market for new disruptive competitors to emerge.”
They and others offer plenty of inspirational material for how inven‐
tors can attract our interest, and I’m happy to leave them to it.
But visionaries and pragmatists have very different expectations—
and here we focus on the practical issues in technology adoption.

The Chasm in Your Company
The point I want to stress is that it is important to recognize that
there are several categories of users and purchasers. Because if you
are considering adopting a new technology, you’re somewhere on
that scale.
If you yourself are an early adopter by nature—you taught yourself

how to program in a brand-new programming language, you built
your own personal computer and giggled while you did so, you
started a computer user group in rural Maine—then the “laggard”

You Say “Disruptive” As If It’s a Good Thing

|

5


viewpoint is unfathomable and the mainstream users seem ridicu‐
lously hidebound. Don’t they realize how much they’re missing?!
Yet your organization—or different departments within it—may
have a different attitude, and you need to take their concerns into
account. Whatever you think of these people individually, you can’t
sell them on a major change without addressing their goals and
fears.
Also, these are not hard-and-fast personality traits. You can be an
early adopter in one realm and a laggard in others, even in business
terms. For example, you may be willing to take a bet on a new social
media plan, but be loath to move your customer relationship man‐
agement system to the cloud. The consequences of failure are minor
in the former case, but could be devastating in the latter.
In fact, it’s wise to limit the number of innovations you adopt. If
nothing else, changing too many variables at once makes it impossi‐
ble to discern which one made the difference.
“There’s a steady stream of ‘cool and new’ things, and if you tried to
adopt every one that came along, you’d be overwhelmed,” says Otto
Berkes, CTO of CA Technologies. “It’s tempting to chase the latest

shiny object, and while doing so may seem like progress, it will ulti‐
mately take you off track. It’s just as important to decide what new
things not to adopt as the things you decide are worth the effort.”

Failure Is Dangerous
Technologies ebb and flow. What was once new and exciting
becomes ho-hum boring and mainstream—in fact, that’s what its
inventors hope for—and eventually it is displaced by the newer and
even more exciting.
Case in point: BlackBerry. When the RIM 950 Wireless Handheld
came out, sporting a patented keyboard design that made it easy to
type with your thumbs, owning one was super-cool. A BlackBerry
email service followed in 1999, leading some businesses to adopt the
technology, since the step-beyond-pagers demonstrated real pro‐
ductivity benefits. If you owned one (a friend did), people (by which
I mean I) would ask to see it, and would quiz you about how it
worked. By 2006, BlackBerrys had become so mainstream that users
were criticized for their “CrackBerry” addiction.

6 | Guidelines for Keeping Pace with Innovation and Tech Adoption: Don’t Just Fail Fast—
Learn Fast


But RIM couldn’t keep up with iPhone and Android, and it was slow
to deliver on the new versions it promised. And now, BlackBerry
says it’s done designing and building its own phones.
Obviously, BlackBerry’s decline and fall is meaningful to the com‐
pany shareholders. But it also illustrates the adoption curve for any
business decision maker. In 2000, suggesting that your company
adopt BlackBerry would make you a forward-thinking iconoclast,

and might earn you a raise and promotion. Ten years later, the same
recommendation would mark you as a hidebound laggard who
wasn’t keeping up with the times.
It’s even more dangerous to fall behind on technology when the
adoption curve involves a lot of moving parts and application inte‐
gration, or the technology otherwise becomes hard to extract after‐
ward. Bringing in a new programming language, office productivity
software, or network infrastructure are the easy examples, since each
requires ongoing support, including employees who know how the
system works. Replacing a company’s mobile phones is relatively
simple and inexpensive, compared to rewriting custom applications
for a new operating system.
This makes the decision process even more stressful. At what point
should a mobile app developer decide to create a version for a new
mobile platform? Maybe JQuery’s time is done; should a develop‐
ment team adopt TypeScript instead? On whose say-so? What
should they consider before they make the decision—beyond the
techie feature catnip issues?
Nobody wants to bet the house on a new platform that doesn’t take
off. I knew OS/2 developers who realized too late that the market
didn’t grow enough to justify their investment in building applica‐
tions for IBM’s operating system. Corporations that did commit to
OS/2 (often for the best of technical reasons—did I mention OS/2
was wonderful?) were forced to replace it. They also had to buy new
Windows or Linux applications, not to mention the cost of rewriting
the custom software they built on top of OS/2, and then they had to
explain all that to the company management to whom they’d suc‐
cessfully argued that this was the right direction.
This happens at a personal level as well. If you’re a mobile developer
of any experience, you remember when it was obvious that you had

to write software for iPhones, but less clear if you should write a ver‐
sion for BlackBerry or Android or Windows Phone. In the early
You Say “Disruptive” As If It’s a Good Thing

|

7


stages of a technology adoption life cycle, it’s nearly impossible to
tell which one is going to take off, and practical limitations (such as
developers having only 24 hours in a day during which to write soft‐
ware) sometimes mean you can’t support every option.

Conservatism Is Okay
Business projects fail regularly even when the technology is under‐
stood and well established. Management mistakes, unreliable suppli‐
ers, poorly trained workers, taken-for-granted assumptions,
inadequate budgets, and many other factors can play havoc with
even the best-laid plans, without including, “Let’s take a chance on
that newfangled thing.”
Newfangled things have a long history of failure. The vendor may go
out of business due to lack of funding, often because too few organi‐
zations were ready to invest in something unproven or the pricing
model was out of whack. Their promised technology advantage may
not pan out. The groundbreaking innovation may go against indus‐
try standards in an environment where standards win out.
As a result, it’s easy to make the argument that businesses should
adopt well-established technologies that offer proven reliability, easy
availability, volume pricing, and adequate useful life—all factors in a

CEO’s goal of reducing the total cost of ownership. It’s a lot easier to
sell management on the “expected” answer.
Being an effective early adopter is a tremendous amount of work. It’s
one thing to buy a consumer item for yourself. For businesses, early
adoption involves a major commitment and can put an organization
at more risk.
Really, you can understand why some companies hang back and
continue to rely on “business as usual,” no matter how frustrating it
might be to the people who want to try the latest innovation. “If it
ain’t broke, don’t fix it” often is a wise viewpoint…to a point.
“The company I currently work for has been around for about 30
years,” explains Jim, its receptionist. “While they do use Quick‐
Books, they still also use handwritten time cards. Only a quarter of
their work records they have is backed up in any way.” The company
owners have always worked that way. But, Jim opines, the oldfashioned workflow weakens the infrastructure of the company,
because employee training takes longer, the records are susceptible

8 | Guidelines for Keeping Pace with Innovation and Tech Adoption: Don’t Just Fail Fast—
Learn Fast


to loss or damage, and it’s more difficult to locate files on paper.
“People stopped using handwritten time cards decades ago,” says
Jim. “There have been no major consequences yet, but I think it’s
only a matter of time.”

Evaluating the Options
When I asked people for their advice about when to jump on board
with a new technology, the most common response was laughter.
“Good luck with that,” said one friend. “Nobody ever knows.”

Yet we each make these decisions sometimes. We commit to a major
shift in tools, technology, or process, and make those choices using
some kind of criteria, consciously or unconsciously. You might
change the core programming language the team uses, adopt a new
environment (such as a move to the cloud), replace a legacy tool
with a more modern one, or start a project with an unproven gadget
(such as seeking a business model using the Internet of Things). We
like to apply some kind of logic to the process, even if we ultimately
go with our guts.
This seems to be the process we each use:
1. Identify the business goals and today’s limitations in addressing
them.
2. Measure the new thing against those goals.
3. Evaluate the impact of the change, for good and ill.
4. What happens if you wait?
5. Make your decision.
6. Implement the change.
We go through this process even when we don’t deliberately identify
each step. Sometimes we use emotional shortcuts that cut to the
chase. We can review a new restaurant in a single sentence (“The
food’s good, but it’s not worth the money.”) or with 2,000 words of
in-depth analysis discussing each item on the menu (particularly its
chocolate dessert).
But, ultimately, the decision-making process takes each of these
issues into account.

Evaluating the Options

|

9


The many questions I raise below may make it sound as though you
should never adopt anything new. Certainly, these seem critical to
my ear. But I raise these objections because other people in your
organization are sure to do so—and it’s a good idea to have an
answer ready. Also, when you realize that you can honestly respond
(to yourself if no one else), “Hey, we’re set with that; no problem!”
you can begin the adoption process with far more confidence.
A jargon note: by now you understand that the whiz-bang item
adoption might be new hardware, a cloud-based application, a new
Agile development methodology—really almost anything. That’d get
unwieldy if I needed to describe each of these options repetitively. So
let’s just refer to the attractive new technology as the Turbo Ninja
Plus, as a generic name for the item you’re swooning over. Got that?
Groovy.

Determine What You Want: Introducing the
Turbo Ninja Plus
“Oh cool!” you might shout, when you first learn about the new
opportunity. “I want me one of those!”
But before you even consider adopting a Turbo Ninja Plus, you have
to determine if it solves any kind of problem you currently experi‐
ence or that you expect to experience. And that sends you back to
square one of any business plan: contemplating your goals.
Whether you run a multimillion-dollar enterprise, volunteer with a
community organization, or lead a tiny development team, there is a
shared purpose. It might be, “Create software that makes architects
shout with joy” or “Give homeowners peace of mind” or “Enable

payroll professionals to pass their certification exams” or “Have fun
with N-scale model trains” or a thousand other things. Sometimes
people give this a formal label, such as “a mission statement,” but
ultimately you provide something of value, usually something that
people are willing to pay for.
And nearly everything you do is in service to that goal, whether or
not you lie awake at 2:00 am agonizing over it. Which means that
the Turbo Ninja Plus must either contribute to you achieving your
goal, or reduce the obstacles that prevent you from achieving that
goal.

10 | Guidelines for Keeping Pace with Innovation and Tech Adoption: Don’t Just Fail Fast—
Learn Fast


The goals and obstacles may present themselves in several ways. For
example, the Turbo Ninja Plus may give customers a new feature
they care about (oh look, more blinking lights—they love blinking
lights!). It might make it easier for you to create those new features
(oh look, an application interface that makes it faster to create
brighter blinking lights!). Or it may remove a barrier that slows or
prevents your ability to deliver on the goal (finally, accounting soft‐
ware that automates our ability to charge customers for those blink‐
ing lights!).
Alexis Davis, founder of H.K. Productions, has a four-step process
when the company contemplates a major tech shift:
1. We revisit our mission.
2. We ask, “How can we best utilize this new technology to better
serve our audience, customers, users?”
3. We research—learning from the best as well as learning from

others’ failures.
4. We put the pieces together to create a plan of execution.
That’s not a bad plan.
Document your process! Take the time to write down your goals—
and the problems that are preventing you from reaching them. Other‐
wise, you might buy a solution that’s a great answer—to the wrong
question. In addition, the act of writing down the goals and prob‐
lems helps you ensure that your team shares the same perceptions.
Plus, in the long term, you can learn from your own mistakes. Let’s
say your company does adopt the new technology. Two years down
the road, look at this documentation to judge how well you estima‐
ted the goals, identified the problems, and predicted the issues.
For example, Praveen Puri, management consultant and president
of Puri Consulting, listens to his clients describe what they want to
do. “I ask them questions such as, ‘Why do you want to make the
change?’ and ‘How is the customer affected?’ Usually, this is a multi‐
step process, where I have to keep asking the questions to get the
next level of answer.”
The conversation might go something like this:
Client: We want to change the website.
Puri: Why do you want to change the website?
Evaluating the Options

|

11


Client: Because it uses an old design.
Puri: How would the change affect the customer?

Client: It will look more modern.
Puri: Do the customers complain about the appearance?
Client: No.
Puri: Will the customer be affected any other way?
Client: Yes, the system will be more secure, so their information is
more secure.
Puri: OK, then it is innovation worth doing.

Measure the Promise Against Your Goals
Sometimes, the situation is obvious: you’re in danger. The existing
hardware keeps crashing, and it’s more expensive to fix than to pur‐
chase a new system. You see a competitor gaining ground and taking
business away from you. A vendor has become unreliable. You rec‐
ognize that employees are wasting time (and thus money and
energy) because they use different software whose data is perpetu‐
ally out of sync.
When you know something has to change, you’re already one step
ahead, because you’re working in service to the team’s goals.
Spreadshirt is an ecommerce platform for on-demand printing of
clothing and accessories. Its platform evolved over more than 10
years, says its CTO, Guido Laures, beginning as a PHP monolith
back in 2003. But, says Laures, the system reached the “point of no
more innovation” in 2013. “Any improvements or even small new
features required major development efforts,” he says. “Every change
had become risky because of the many interdependencies from
rather unrelated parts of the platform. Changing something at one
place caused multiple issues at other places of the architecture.”
Obviously, something had to change. Even if the existing system
generated significant revenue for Spreadshirt, its fragility was evi‐
dent. “But how do you get rid of a system that is unmaintainable but

generates millions in revenue?” Laures asks.
If you have never owned a database before and you see a need to
adopt one, the only issue is, “Which one?” You can make a choice
based on your feature wish list, your budget, and your heart’s desire.

12 | Guidelines for Keeping Pace with Innovation and Tech Adoption: Don’t Just Fail Fast—
Learn Fast


It’s more complex when fixing one problem raises new ones, as
Spreadshirt discovered. Sure, the Turbo Ninja Plus (hypothetically)
promises to help your development team create its products faster,
which certainly would make happier customers and stuff more cash
into the company’s coffers. But adopting it means that staff have to
be trained to use the new tool, you have to upgrade the company’s
servers, and you may need to argue with another department about
changing the workflow. Sure, the Turbo Ninja Plus is better than
what you have now—but is it better enough? It might bring in more
money—but are the profits more than the costs?
In either case, you need to investigate the opportunities and meas‐
ure them against the team’s mission. It’s a good idea to make a list of
the criteria to use in deciding to jump on board. Whether the Turbo
Ninja Plus’s promises originate with a vendor, from the tech com‐
munity, or via a fad, often we can be distracted by features that
sound appealing, but can’t demonstrate that they support the team’s
goals.
“The question to ask about anything new is whether it adds real cus‐
tomer value,” Puri says. “It must either allow customers to do some‐
thing new that they want or need, or it must make core functions
better, faster, or easier.”

“Remember that innovation is applied creativity,” Puri adds. “Clever‐
ness which does not add value to the underlying business needs is
throwing good money after bad.”
Sometimes, familiarity rightfully wins out over coolness. “We tried
to implement a new instant messaging solution to address email
overload problems,” says Sushil Kumar, CMO of Robin Systems, a
small but growing company. “There are lots of discussions under
way at any given time, which can form the basis for critical business
decisions.” Traditionally these conversations happen in email
threads, which can be difficult to archive and to share with new
employees. Kumar decided to test-drive the newest, coolest messag‐
ing application. “However, we could not get people to use it,” Kumar
says, “partly because of the product issues and partly because of the
cultural issues.” Most users stuck to email, which meant more com‐
plexity—since employees now were having conversations in two
places instead of one. “We therefore decided to abandon the messag‐
ing app implementation until we were ready for it,” Kumar
concluded.

Evaluating the Options

|

13


That’s why it’s important to understand the value creation process in
your business, says CA Technologies’ Berkes. He suggests answering
these questions:
• What specific value will it bring to your customers and your

business?
• What are the risks? What are the opportunity costs for adop‐
tion?
• Is it something that you can try to adopt incrementally, or will it
require a “big dig”?

Consider the Consequences of Adoption—and Failure
Many people ask, “How well does it solve the problem or improve
our ability to deliver on our promises?” But there are at least two
additional issues to consider, as you analyze the Turbo Ninja Plus’s
suitability to the task.
• What consequences would you encounter if you implemented
it?
• What would happen if you didn’t?
As much as we’re drawn toward new and better solutions, imple‐
menting them affects the way we do business. (If they didn’t, why
bother?) We like to think about the positive effects, such as
improved efficiency or faster delivery time. But what else might hap‐
pen? How likely is it to occur? What could you do to ensure the best
outcome? What would have to change in order for the adoption to
be a success?
The earlier the innovation appears on the technology adoption
curve, the more often your answer is, “I have no idea,” and the more
you should assume the associated costs are relatively high—at least
in the short term.
For example, imagine you are considering adopting a new program‐
ming language that is optimized for part of your knowledge or tech‐
nology domain. Only a handful of developers have any level of
expertise programming in that language, so they’re harder to find
and they command a higher salary than the average programmer on

your staff. Training resources are difficult too; nobody’s written a

14 | Guidelines for Keeping Pace with Innovation and Tech Adoption: Don’t Just Fail Fast—
Learn Fast


book about the language yet, much less created a track for it at your
favorite programming conference.
Those concerns are balanced, presumably, by the advantages of
being first to market and getting a head start on the learning curve,
and by the actual benefits of the new language. Plus, you don’t want
to adopt the technology too late and miss out on its competitive
advantage.
But those advantages are difficult to prove. And what happens if
your assumptions are wrong?
Almost by definition, you are proposing a major change. How com‐
fortable are the players and stakeholders with the disruption caused
by the tech adoption?
Don’t think only in terms of the managers and other people who
have to sign off, who may never actually touch the new system. Con‐
sider the line-of-business worker. For instance, your chief financial
officer may decide that it’s time to replace the expense reporting sys‐
tem. Until now, every employee has had to email a spreadsheet and
PDFs of receipts; that’s a pain for the accounting staff, especially as it
has no useful reporting procedure and they need to construct their
analysis manually. But if you consult only the CFO and accounting
staff about what’s needed in a new SaaS expense-reporting applica‐
tion, you won’t learn about the features most valued by the employ‐
ees who have to use the software.
Unless you meet with each group of people affected by the proposed

change, you also won’t learn about their fears and desires, which
absolutely reflects their willingness to make a change.
The following questions may help you evaluate the consequences.

Technology consequences
• Does the Turbo Ninja Plus require you to change infrastructure?
What depends on the current and proposed technology, and
what does it depend on? What do the changes cost, in dollars,
time, and complexity? Will those downstream changes turn into
a yak shaving experience?
• What’s the reliability of the Turbo Ninja Plus? Based on what
metrics, measured by whom? How does that compare to the
current system?

Evaluating the Options

|

15


• What’s the performance like? How does that affect what hap‐
pens at a later stage in the process?
• How can you measure its value? How long will it continue to
provide value?
• Do you need to provide training? How available is it, at what
cost? How much staff time needs to be budgeted for the train‐
ing? What work won’t get done while they’re learning the Turbo
Ninja Plus’s intricacies?
• How do you judge your team’s ability to implement the change,

based on existing in-house knowledge?

People and team consequences
• How much support do you have from company leadership?
How much has the boss bought in to the proposed innovation?
• What will it take to convince management of the suggested
path? How do you keep them up to date during the transition?
What happens to the company, project, and your reputation if it
fails?
• What needs to happen to ensure user acceptance? Especially
given that “new and different” is jarring? How can you over‐
come resistance to learning the new technology?
• Do you have time to make changes and adjustments?

Process adjustment consequences
• How does the innovation affect current processes or proce‐
dures? For whom?
• Does this have social implications? Does it mean changes in col‐
laboration or communication styles?
• What are the direct and indirect costs? How does this inter‐
weave with other budgetary priorities?
• What is the effect for the development or implementation
teams? How does this affect their existing workload and work
stress?
In each case, also ask yourself: what would happen if we waited?

16 | Guidelines for Keeping Pace with Innovation and Tech Adoption: Don’t Just Fail Fast—
Learn Fast

Many of those questions may yield heartening results. For example,
if the Turbo Ninja Plus really is as fast as the vendor promises, your
answers largely may be positive: customers get their products faster,
employees aren’t frustrated by having to respond to downtime prob‐
lems, and you can break into new markets.
These questions should raise opportunities, not just challenges.
For example, Puri worked with a major bank that acquired a smaller
bank. “The original plan was to shut down the smaller bank’s bank‐
ing systems and switch their customers to the acquiring bank’s
system,” Puri says. “They found, however, that the smaller bank’s
software was rated higher on user surveys. We ended up combining
the systems. Now, all their customers use the smaller bank’s frontend
software, while the older bank’s backend software handles the com‐
bined customer volume.”
Even after you resolve all those questions, you still won’t think of
everything. In fact, it’s the problems you didn’t consider that are apt
to hurt you the most, because you put nothing in place to address
those issues.

Sell the Change
Let’s say that you personally have concluded that the Turbo Ninja
Plus is a good option. Now you need to convince other people of
that direction—even if the decision is yours to make.
“Successful organizational change requires a shift in perspective,”
says Reinvention Consulting’s Osolind. “Employees become an inte‐
gral component of the entire change equation.”
Remember the technology adoption cycle? You might see the oppor‐
tunity of the Turbo Ninja Plus, but it is unlikely to be equally evident
to everyone in the company. When you discuss the new option’s
advantages and disadvantages with managers, users, and other

stakeholders, consider their worldviews too.
For example, when you talk with an early adopter about the Turbo
Ninja Plus, you can bring up its technical specifications, its likeli‐
hood to give the company a serious competitive advantage, and the
irritation of putting up with its growing pains. To a technology
enthusiast, it’s often worth taking a chance on something new, and
such supporters are happy to invest in at least a pilot project.

Evaluating the Options

|

17


But if you aim to insert something truly new into a corporate envi‐
ronment, acknowledge your listeners’ mainstream attitudes. The
same sales pitch you gave to the early adopters can turn off conser‐
vative decision makers. Buyers in the early majority can understand
practical value, but they want to be reassured that they aren’t the
very first to encounter problems. Stress the business references and
metrics collected by other reputable organizations. You can comfort
these people by citing the Turbo Ninja Plus’s conformance to indus‐
try standards and its sustainable improvements.
Not every person says no because he is a technology laggard.
Among the reasons people prefer to wait before adoption are:
Their needs are latent
While they suffer the same effects as those who are excited
about the proposed improvement, they haven’t actively identi‐
fied that a solution exists, let alone considered a product or ser‐

vice. A trusted comrade can speak to the situation (“We never
realized how much time we spent doing that!”), and hopefully
you’re the person with that reputation, but in general these folks
are immune to any marketing beyond word of mouth. Help
them see that they have a problem worth solving, and they will
be ready to consider a solution without friction or interference.
They perceive a high cost of change
That can be monetary: surely the budget can be spent on some‐
thing with a safer and predictable outcome? Or we know the
product price will come down when the technology is more
established? These people also may view the cost in terms of the
difficulty of moving data and procedures from one system to
another, such as a database transfer or rewriting code. Consider
how your implementation answers each of these concerns.
They are wary of losing competence
Even minor changes affect employee routines and rituals, such
as adding yet another social media client or recreating an
invoicing process. Even when a dusty old tool is substandard,
it’s familiar, and you know how to work around its foibles. A
new system means discovering the new weaknesses (usually the
hard way) without any idea of how to fix the problems. Yet
again, education can make a difference; so can creating docu‐
mentation that guides users from the “old way” to the “new
way.” For example, when Microsoft worked (successfully) to dis‐
18 | Guidelines for Keeping Pace with Innovation and Tech Adoption: Don’t Just Fail Fast—
Learn Fast


place WordPerfect with Word in business environments, it
emphasized how easy it was to import WordPerfect files.

“It’s important to address each challenge head on, while making sure
everyone is comfortable with the change,” says Kumar. In practical
terms, you need to build safeguards against unexpected roadblocks
or failures. “Education and realistic expectation setting is key to
making sure adoption happens at a pace that is acceptable,” Kumar
says.
“Selling a change impacts the entire ecosystem of an organization,
from employees and customers to strategic partners, vendors, the
supply chain, and processes/procedures,” says Osolind. “Change
leadership works best when you invite the entire ecosystem to help
you rewrite the storyline. When folks make decisions and feel like
they are choosing for themselves, they’re more likely to be commit‐
ted to the outcome.”
“Beyond communicating a clear vision, allocating the right resour‐
ces, and aligning performance management systems, the key to suc‐
cessful organizational change is removing barriers and creating
circumstances in which employees’ inherent motivation and drive is
freed and channeled toward achievable goals,” says Osolind. “Doing
so requires that aforementioned shift in perspective, where employ‐
ees at all levels are not merely informed about change or trained to
manage and handle change but rather deemed to be an integral
active component of the entire change equation. Start a small
groundswell. Create a grassroots movement. Train the trainer. Con‐
sider perks for ideas and usage adoption at various levels.”
Some organizations are more open to change than others. For H.K.
Productions’ Davis, opinions are welcomed when backed with pro‐
active suggestions. “We listen, apply what’s useful, and move for‐
ward,” says Davis. “And as progress is made so are the minds of
those who were hesitant in the beginning.”
Ideally, you’d like to work for a company with a culture of innova‐

tion, where it’s okay to experiment and fail. But that doesn’t have to
mean, “Be the company that takes big chances.”
“Any company has a culture that it should look at as an asset when
it’s contemplating change,” says Dave Gray, management consultant
and author of The Connected Company (O’Reilly, 2014). Those
aspects shape decisions, including the choices you reject.

Evaluating the Options

|

19