Design for Everyone? No.
When creating a culture of open communication and collaboration, things will need to be moved and people’s work flows will be disrupted.
Change aversion is real. Facebook, Gmail and Snap have all rolled out new versions of their product with a goal of making user behavior simpler. They have all found the pitchforks at their door threatening to leave if the changes aren’t reverted. The users stay and put their pitchforks down after a few weeks.
When it comes to redesigning a culture from the industrial to the information age, there will be many bumps along the long-term road (map).
See the technology adoption life cycle image above. If you cater towards the late majority and the laggards, you are bound to exacerbate the broken processes that have made throughout the previous decades. Scaling up broken processes is a real threat that could take your successor (you’ve failed at this point) years to unravel and fix.
Focus on the early adopters and the early majority. The video below displays in under 3 minutes exactly why you should ignore the late majority and the laggards.
In the video you’ll notice that the late majority and laggards are overcome by the early adopters and the early majority. Highlight their successes in every way possible including the on the intranet, email and physical posters. The culture shift comes from everyone seeing that the “new” behavior is all right. It’s not only all right, it’s way more efficient and effective than the old processes.
New followers emulate followers, not the leader.
This post is the latest in a series of explorations by Alan Berkson and me into what we are calling The Control Scale, a guide to digital communication and collaboration. We are writing our book out loud. If you’d like to stay up-to-date with our happenings, please subscribe to our mailing list. Yeah, it’s old school, but email is not dead. Mistreated, maybe. But not dead.
