Month: September 2021

The hypodermic needle peeked out of the ground cover next to the sidewalk, glistening a bit in the cool morning air.

 

My partner and I saw it on the way back from our local coffee shop and tried to figure out what to do.

 

I’m always surprised by how small hypodermics are — a cylinder with a few milliliters of liquid and a needle that’s only a centimeter or so long. But despite their size, they command so much energy and attention from those that use them.

 

Seattle has a homelessness and drug use crisis. They’re different facets of a complex, multifaceted system that stymies government and community groups alike.

 

But that’s an essay for another day.

 

Today I want to write about late adopters.

 

While my partner went to the house to get a plastic container that we could use to secure the needle, I stood watch over the needle in case a curious kiddo walked by out of reach of his family.

 

It was a lovely morning, and I said good morning to passers-by. As I smiled and greeted a woman who looked to be in her late 70s, I noticed that she had a Netflix envelope in her hand.

 

Like, the kind that you could use to send a DVD back after you’d watched it.

 

Huh! I didn’t know they still had those.

 

“What kind of movies do you watch?” I asked her.

 

“Oh, all kinds. Mostly family-friendly, some documentaries.”

 

What about streaming?

 

“Oh, I might get on that someday. But for now, I like my DVDs.”

 

Lovely!

 

My neighbor is very much a late adopter. Content with getting DVDs in the mail, she felt no particular pressure to join the streaming revolution.

 

I had found a late adopter.

 

Mailing DVDs worked well enough for her, and so she stuck with it.

 

Now, I don’t have an opinion on whether Netflix’s DVD-by-mail product (which operates through a subsidiary) should exist.

 

But I like that they are, at least for now, giving my neighbor what she wants.

 

I’m not exactly sure what it is, but the experts I support through change often focus on late adopters in their change process. They want to spend time, energy, and resources pushing challenging people toward change.

 

I think this impulse comes from a desire for completeness. In the puzzle that is change, high-achieving leaders want to know that they can be successful. They know that late adopters will be challenging, so they want to start working on them right away — making their case, convincing them — to ensure they have all the right pieces in place.

 

This strategy turns out to be counterproductive. Engaging with late adopters too early sucks the energy from your change.

 

Instead, start by focusing on early adopters who will champion your process. There are three benefits of this approach.

 

1. If done right, you’ll learn more working with them (they’ll bring energy, data, and suggestions to you).

2. You’ll create change that has an impact. Everyone in an organization rarely needs to make a change at precisely the same time.

   Early adopters will start to experience the benefits of change as soon as they start doing things differently. If you make 30% of your organization better at something by 10%, that’s better than a change stalling because you’re spending all your energy trying to convince late adopters.

3. You’ll demonstrate success and create FOMO. Then, as early adopters start working in a new way, and as you iterate to refine your solutions, others will start to see the value of what’s been created and get interested.

   You’ll be well-positioned to scale change across your organization rather than fight to get “buy-in.”

 

Now, late adopters may not be able to stay that way forever. They’ll move on, be asked to leave, or they’ll keep their corner of the world as it is, forgoing the benefits of the change.

 

They’ll still get DVDs when the rest of the world is streaming.

 

But that’s OK, as long as you’re willing to run the DVD business.

 

But imagine if Netflix had waited for everyone, my neighbor included, to be ready before they launched streaming.

 

That would be a mistake. Don’t spend so long with the late adopters that you never get started!

 

Change is hard enough as it is.

 

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“I don’t know.”

 

It’s taken me a long time to learn to say that phrase.

 

Not literally, of course (all the words are straightforward!)

 

And not about minor things, either; I’ve always been good at the artful dodge: “Hmm, that’s an interesting question. I don’t know, but I’ll do some research and get back to you.”

 

It’s taken me a long time to inhabit the space of profound not knowing.

 

I managed to step into that space last summer and, in a meeting with an important client, admit that I didn’t know how to solve the problem we were working on.

 

It was terrifying.

 

I had a lot of anxiety because my client (a team of senior engineers at a very successful global company) had brought me in to support them as they worked on a sprawling, complex problem.

 

And I was struggling. I understood parts of their work and, logically, their path forward made sense.

 

But the engineers I was working with (who understood that they had a complex problem) kept asking me what I thought they should do. I reflected on my work with other companies that had solved similar issues and drew on our research from Meltdown — but I didn’t feel like my answers were having an impact.

 

Then about halfway through our work, I realized that my job wasn’t to know the answer.

 

It wasn’t to tell them about how a different organization had solved a big, complex problem.

 

Instead, my job was to help them realize that they didn’t have to know the answer either. 

 

Why? I’ll get to that, but first, it’s worth acknowledging how hard it is to admit that we don’t know the answer.

 

The space of not knowing is elusive because we spend so much time answering questions.

 

“How do you…”

 

“What do you think about my idea to…”

 

“What are you going to do next…”

 

“What’s your plan for…”

 

Questions are great, but these questions harbor the assumption that there is, in fact, an answer. That the world is simple enough, linear enough, that it’s helpful to know something.

 

We’re asked to answer these kinds of questions our whole lives, from teachers, colleagues, bosses. And we learn that, by giving answers, we get praised, promoted, and rewarded.

 

As we deepen our expertise, we rely on our ability to answer so much that we can’t leave it behind.

 

To be clear: I have nothing against expertise. Or answers!

 

But these days, the most critical questions are the ones that experts can’t answer.

 

That’s because most answers can’t be separated from the people involved in the problem. 

 

When we want something to change, when we want our teams to work together differently, even when we want to adopt a new piece of technology, we can do none of that without the people involved changing their behavior.

 

But people behave as they do because something is useful about their behavior. For example, if we’re quick to anger, that might make us feel safe by getting others to stay clear. If we tend to fade away during discussions, that might make us feel safe, too: if people don’t notice us, we can avoid scrutiny.

 

The same is true with organizations and teams. Bureaucratic organizations get something from their bureaucracy (a sense of certainty and control, perhaps). Chaotic organizations do as well (a sense of freedom, creativity, and busyness).

 

When we ground our work on a problem in the benefits that we, our teams, and our organizations get from the current behavior, we make it safe to experiment.

 

Say that we want to encourage people to be less bureaucratic. How might we (for example) ensure that leaders feel like things are being done safely even as we reduce the complexity of our procedures? What if we…?

 

How might we add structure to preserve our creative abilities while reducing the time people waste time in chaos? What if we…?

 

These are questions – but they’re very different kinds of questions. They’re questions that lead to experiments, to a series of things that we might want to try.

 

When we think in this way, it transforms what the word “answer” even means.

 

Answers stop living in the text of an email or the thesis of a strategy document. They stop being “should” statements, i.e., “I think we should…”

 

Instead, answers become rooted in action.

 

Answers are the results of things that we try, whether or not we got what we expected.

 

“Oh, that worked! Let’s do more of that.”

 

Or “Oh, no way. That was a mess. What do we want to try next?”

 

When I admitted to the engineers and my client that I didn’t know the answer, it was like the whole room took a breath.

 

I started our meeting by saying, “I don’t know the answer. And – even if for some reason I did know it, you guys wouldn’t believe me. A few of you have been doing this kind of work for longer than I’ve been alive.”

 

“I’ve been feeling this pressure to give you an answer, which makes me wonder — do you all feel that pressure, too? Do you feel like your job is to know the answer?”

 

They did. And acknowledging that shifted our whole work together.

 

Instead of trying to find an answer, we started to think in terms of experiments. How might we…? What do we want to try next?

 

And that changed everything.

 

So, dear reader, what’s a problem you’re trying to answer where you might experiment instead? Comment and let me know.

 

Ps: The free preview of Crossing Thresholds, the course I’ve been writing about, was last week. I found it just as powerful as it was when I took it the first time, and I am soooo excited to be enrolled in the full course.

 

If you’re interested in moving toward the unknown and crossing your own threshold, but you missed the chance, don’t fret (maybe procrastination is a behavior that you’re interested in letting go of…?):

 

Watch the recording of the free preview and sign up here for the full course, which takes place on September 21, 28 and October 5 & 12 from 10 AM–1 PM Pacific Time each Tuesday.

 

ps: I mentioned this before, but I’m an affiliate for Amba’s course. That means I’ll get a commission if you sign up for the full course. I’ll never promote any work I don’t believe in — and in this case, I’m paying for the course, too, so I’ll be taking it right there beside you.

 

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