Bottom-up standardization

For the past year my team at Ford has been working on a project that involves us visiting the company’s various manufacturing plants across North America, where we’ve been conducting interviews and contextual inquiries with workers. Although we are trying to understand a technology problem that is common to basically all the sites we’ve visited, each one has its own needs, culture, and way of doing things, and each is affected by this technology problem in slightly different ways.

Once our research is turned into a design and that design has been piloted, my team knows there will be some pressure to standardize it across all sites. Meanwhile the various sites each have their own idea of what an ideal solution to this technology problem should be.

Many large organizations I’ve worked for have experienced some version of this same scenario, and it has me thinking about how the success of standardizing any solution depends not only on the solution itself, but on how the process of standardization is approached.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both centralized and localized solutions, but they are typically framed as being in opposition. How can companies break out of this stalemate?

I decided to reframe the situation as something other than a “problem”, in a way that will hopefully be more illuminating. And I took a lesson from several instances where standardization has been achieved with more success.

Understanding a situation as a problem sets up an expectation that you can “solve” it once and for all. If we take our pet solution and try to justify it by overcoming objections, natural human biases will inevitably take over. This is how we end up with the familiar story of leadership ramming an unwanted solution down employees’ throats, or employees avoiding or even sabotaging an unwanted solution rolled out to them by leadership.

It is necessary to deeply understand both sides of the situation. One of the more stimulating things about UX research is getting to hear from different sets of stakeholders, which provides a unique vantage point that I’d liken to stereoscopy. When different sets of stakeholders believe they are in conflict with each other, it can even be like seeing in an extra dimension, almost like cubism.

Bill Watterson masterfully illustrates what happens when Calvin sees both sides of an issue.

In my own words, standardization is when you take something that provides benefits in one context and put that same thing into lots of different contexts, with the aim of reaping not only those same benefits over and over again, but additional benefits that come just from having created uniformity.

But it doesn’t always work out this way. Sometimes the other contexts are a poor fit, and often the end users push back, sometimes rightly so. I’d bet everyone can think of some examples of times when attempts to standardize were justifiably unwelcome.

So, what are some strong arguments for and against both standardized or “centralized” solutions and customized or “local” solutions? Below are some I’ve heard over the years:

I tried to organize this table so pros and cons on the same line mostly corresponded with each other, but really they are in no particular order.

By the way, there is scholarly research backing up some of the items in this table. For example, Farrell et al. published a paper in the 80s in the Rand Journal of Economics about how one of the risks of standardization is it can lock you into an inferior product; their paper has since been cited thousands of times, indicating the enduring salience of that insight.

A side benefit of laying out pros and cons like this is it prompts us to think about the practical and emotional impact of the change so it can be more effectively communicated about when the time comes. And importantly, this exercise decouples our own emotions from whatever solution we ultimately pursue, which helps to make subsequent decisions less prone to biases and blind spots.

With these arguments laid out, it is clear there is no neat easy answer that would please everyone and resolve all the misalignment. It is also clear we are really talking about trade-offs. Whatever the solution, it will need to manage these trade-offs.

Internalizing all this allowed it to become a filter as I absorbed other ideas and examples. It didn’t take long before I stumbled across two that were revelatory.

The first example was from US legal codes. Our system of federalism defines certain responsibilities as those of the Federal government, and leaves others to the states. However, states sometimes have an interest in working from the same set of uniform laws as other states, but in areas outside the proper jurisdiction of the Federal government.

When this happens, I learned, what gets created is called a Uniform Act. These are written collaboratively among different states. There are more than a hundred of them, typically concerning matters related to commerce but sometimes other things like child custody, land use, foreign judgments, controlled substances, and so on. 

The way it works is various state governors appoint members to a body called the Uniform Law Commission, who drafts a copy of whatever act the states will be asked to sign on to. The Commission has no direct legislative power; instead, the acts it drafts only become state laws as each state legislature signs onto them. 

This caught my eye because we are used to hearing about standardization as a top-down thing, but this is essentially a form of bottom-up standardization: using a system of representative government, the people who would be the subjects of standardization get together and decide what it is they’re standardizing to, and then agree to it before it is implemented. And they agree to it because they buy into the idea and think it will work for them. 

How could something like that work for various local sites within large companies? What if there was a technology solution that various sites could opt into? It would require some marketing, in the sense of making sure all the sites knew the system was available, what it entailed, what its benefits were, and how to onboard it, but sites that did make an informed decision to opt in would presumably reap those benefits, without feeling like the solution was foisted on them by ivory tower executives in HQ.

Remember that even an okay system met with enthusiasm by its users is probably going to work better than a perfect system that users feel resentful about.   

The second example was ISO, or the International Organization for Standardization, which oversees the implementation of tens of thousands of technical standards for everything from shipping containers to the light-sensitivity of photographic film. ISO is the reason the nuts you buy at one hardware store match the bolts you might buy at another hardware store—even in another country. Name just about any manufactured product and there’s a good chance there are one or more of these standards in its specifications. ISO standards are at work behind almost every facet of ordinary life and most people don’t realize it.  

But in the last few decades there has been rising controversy over who sets these standards and what they should be. One instance of this involves the increasing share of Chinese manufacturing in the global economy, which has led to a push from China saying they should have a larger seat at the table in developing standards. In an effort to preempt this, national governments worldwide have become more eager to dictate (from the top down) their own standards to whatever manufacturing is within their jurisdiction. 

Advocacy for bottom-up standardization has come from people such as Duff Johnson, Executive Director of the PDF Association, who used that exact term in an article last year in which he said “standards work best for everyone when they are developed openly”, calling for an “organic process”. He recommends that governments engage with industry at the subject matter expert level, creating a win-win in which the government gains expertise, skills, and context, and the industry members can better understand government viewpoints and interests. 

This provides an important perspective on how companies might standardize technology solutions. Executive stakeholders should engage with ground-level employees on the SME level, where each can benefit from exposure to and empathy with the other’s working paradigm. Fortunately, Duff Johnson’s suggestions reflect the way my UX research team is already going about our various projects. 

We have a responsibility to ensure corporate stakeholders understand the SME perspective, and at the same time we have to address the corporate interest in standardization, with its attendant tradeoffs but also undeniable benefits. Our interviews and contextual inquiries are those engagements with subject matter experts, and the insights we collect and synthesize will be shared with corporate stakeholders. So in addition to providing guidelines for the technology designers and developers we work with, this insight about bottom-up standardization represents an opportunity to realize we are forging a bridge between the highest and lowest levels of our company.

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Privacy and Security in 2021

I just got a new phone, which means a good chunk of time spent slogging through its OS, opening every menu I can find, and turning off any setting that might plausibly translate into packets of information flying through the air without my explicitly sending or asking for them.

As before, my new phone is a “dumb-phone” (what else?), but even candybar and flip phones these days are equipped with all kinds of geolocation, auto-updates, background data, and other transmission capabilities, turned on by default, that could translate into data about me and my life being captured, sold, archived on some corporate server somewhere, and otherwise used to lower my quality of life.

People who see me using a flip phone tend to have the same reaction: praise (“Nice! A flip phone!”), admiration (“Good for you!”), even statements of jealousy (“I wish I could have a phone like that!”). But occasionally I encounter the opposite response: a kind of huffy sneer, as if I’m rocking the boat and holding society back by not getting with the smartphone program. Indeed, if quality of life is defined as maximizing convenience and computer-assisted abilities, I am lowering my quality of life, as well as that of anyone who might want to text me a link (rather than email it), or have me download their app, or whatever else smartphone users do in their sleep but which I kept out of my life.

But in the most basic sense it isn’t true: in this case my quality of life is improved through inconvenience. I don’t have Twitterer’s brain, I don’t interrupt conversations to look things up, and I don’t Google anything. (I use Duckduckgo instead and highly recommend it!)

I almost wrote “I don’t Google anything, ever” but eliminated that last word because it’s not technically true: from my laptop running a VPN and my location data concealed as best I can, I sometimes use Youtube, Google Maps, Google Scholar, and for some collaborative activities I go along with their use of Google Drive.

In each case I have taken reasonable steps to restrict access to my data, but I know it is never perfect, and I also know a motivated and skilled person can probably find a way to get it anyway. There is no perfect privacy or security, ever. In “meatspace” we live in houses with windows, after all. Parabolic and laser microphones are a thing. Camera drones are getting smaller and quieter all the time. You walk into someone’s house and you never know what devices are listening. Surveillance cameras are ubiquitous, from doorbells to stoplights. In the virtual world, where everything can be recorded, copied, and sent to a million places at once, perfect privacy and security are even less plausble.

But to me, this makes it even more important to define and defend a reasonable expectation of privacy and security, especially on my phone and laptop. I know these devices will never be perfectly private and secure. I know that I could spend years learning the most advanced cryptography skills and tighten up my my privacy and security more. I also know I could take the path of least resistance and do nothing, opting for maximum convenience instead. I choose the middle path, of maximizing the privacy and security I can get right now, for a few hours’ work.

Data and tracking and updates and geolocation services are turned off. Caches are cleared. Privacy settings are thoroughly fiddled-with. My phone is as dumb as I can make it. It’s a great feeling!

Technology Ethics: My Seven Year Journey

In 2014 I attended a UX conference in which the closing keynote was about how the future will have no interface. The presenter gushed about the years ahead, when transhumanist devices, the Internet of Things, and ubiquitous sensors will transform our world into one in which the interface, instead of being located on a device, is the world itself:

You won’t have a light switch on your wall; you’ll turn on the light by pointing at it in a decisive way. You won’t learn to draw; you’ll wear a wristband that jiggles your hand as you hold a pencil to paper, causing you to make marks indistinguishable from those that might have been put there by a trained artist. You won’t interact with computer hardware; virtual objects and a keyboard will be projected right onto your desk and you’ll manipulate them as if they were real.

Rather than get excited for this, my reaction was horror and disgust. On my two-hour drive home I wondered if I was in the wrong industry, if maybe I should pack up my family and start life over in some kind of ultra-primitive arrangement in the woods.

I got over the worst of it by the time I arrived home, but I was left wondering why I had had that strong reaction and what it meant. What was it about that future that felt so wrong? What could I learn from it?

Eventually I figured out that what I recoiled from was the threat to my values presented by these technologies. All the sensors and complex circuitry required to make the IoT work violated my desire for simplicity and privacy; the transhumanist devices attacked my sense of authenticity; and so on. Moreover, I feared the alienation I would feel from my children if (or when) they embraced these technologies and absorbed their attendant values.

Amish churches, I came to learn, have successfully tackled this exact problem by drafting ordnungs — written community guidelines, more or less — that include regulations about which technologies may be owned and used as normal, or else must be modified, kept outside the home, or banned entirely. As a result the Amish appear frozen in time to most outsiders, but it is hard to deny they also enjoy the benefits of tight-knit communities, lower rates of physical and mental illness, and are even seeing a decades-long drop in attrition. Apparently being able to control the direction and pace of change in one’s social values comes with a huge payoff.

Although the Amish do not explicitly map technologies to values, this was something I recognized as necessary. In 2015 I devised a design process model in which the values potentially supported or threatened by a proposed technology are evaluated deeply so their primary and secondary effects on users’ lives might be anticipated, and negative effects avoided. I got as far as testing this process model, but the results were unclear. Later I determined my experimental design likely did not control variables tightly enough. Further, I conjectured that the system that includes both technology and modern western social values is probably too complex to predictably influence with a design process model.

I was deflated by this setback, but soon began to notice lots of other people had started talking about ethics in design. It sounded like many people shared my concerns about the future of technology and its impact on society. When I gave a presentation on this topic at Midwest UX in 2017, it seemed like half the other presentations shared the same theme.

(I wrote an article describing my technology ethics journey up to this point, with more detail about the process model and how I tested it, on Pomiet’s website in 2016.)

Shortly afterward I joined a fledgling discussion group, Ethical Technology, founded by someone who’d struck me by his intelligence and clear writing on the subject. Many of the things he said felt like things I’d wanted to say but hadn’t found words for.

The discussion group soon grew quite sizeable but I found the tone of the conversation had changed. We didn’t seem to be talking about technology as much we talked about the people making it. It did not take long for the dialogue to devolve further, all the way into partisan politics. Sometimes technology was merely decoration and not relevant to what people were really talking about; the issues raised seemed purely about political ideology. Disillusioned with both its political fixation and ideological uniformity, I left the discussion group and returned to thinking and reading on my own.

Around that time, during my “day job” I was the UX researcher on a learning management system that was to eventually be rolled out to thousands of employees at the large company where I worked. In our team meetings we frequently discussed the change management aspects of the project, and I came to see how the user experience and the change experience were intricately tied together.

I became fascinated with the field of change management. I read its foundational texts and many of its journal articles, and attended meetings of the local chapter of the ACMP. But I did all this with a critical eye: I wanted to show that those who resist technology change need to be listened to rather than persuaded. This stands as the most recent influence on my thinking about technology ethics.

The success of the Amish is ultimately attributable to the control and self-determination they are able to exercise over their technology adoption decisions. I have come to see that as the most basic truth of technology ethics. The most important aspect of a technology’s design when it comes to ethics is the degree to which the human user can control his or her relationship with that technology. This means the ethics may come from the design of the technology itself, or from the rules and customs that surround it, but will ultimately be determined by the user’s freedom to adopt or reject it.

This also means few technologies are ethically perfect. We give up some freedom of what technologies to use or avoid when we agree to work for various employers, or sometimes even just to live in certain areas. We adopt many technologies simply because they are considered normal and baseline, and we never think twice about it.

Yet awareness of this situation brings into sharper relief the opportunities to make technology more ethical. That is what I hope to do in my work these days, and going forward.

Social interaction and technological mediation under Lockdown

The shelter-in-place order in response to Covid-19 has demonstrated both the necessity and insufficiency of virtual socialization. Technologies like Zoom and Skype (not to mention email) have allowed countless people to remain employed, to check in with each other, and to enjoy some diversion from the tedium of confinement.

But although most states are only in week three or four of “lockdown” I am already seeing accounts of people, particularly those who live alone, suffering emotional breakdowns as a result of their physical isolation. Seeing and hearing each other in real-time is a marvelous thing, but we apparently have a deeper need to be with other people.

Videoconferencing in 3D with goggles and headphones (i.e. VR) might one day become a viable way to fulfill that need. But it presents an additional hurdle: participants will have most of their faces covered by cumbersome equipment. One solution is for participants to represent themselves with 3D avatars.. But this detracts significantly from the verisimilitude of the experience, which was supposed to be the whole point.

What is less clear is whether people will care. Maybe feeling as if you’re around someone else, even if that someone looks like an obviously-fake 3D avatar, is still psychologically preferable to interacting with a video representation of a person, even a realistic one, if that representation must be mediated by a screen held at arm’s length.

“A System to Change the Culture”

The title of this blog post is a quote from Michael Corboy, the assistant commissioner of police in New South Wales, Australia. He used that phrase to describe the introduction of traffic cameras that use an AI to detect when drivers are on the phone.

I think it’s a profound phrase. In one sense, it’s backward from how we normally like to think about the relationship between technology systems and culture: we want our culture to grow organically, and our technology systems to be designed around them, in a humane way that preserves and supports our values. Intuitively, the culture should affect the system rather than the other way around.

But in another sense, this acknowledges a very real and basic phenomenon that happens any time a system is introduced into a culture: the culture changes. Now, the intended changes rarely obtain exactly the way they’re meant to, at least without unintended side-effects, but the relationship between human culture and manmade systems is definitely a two-way street.

These traffic cameras will have some impact on traffic safety in NSW. And, they will incite some amount of backlash from people who feel intruded upon by Big Brother. But a lot of people will respond with indifference, and these cameras might even further normalize and legitimize the idea of high-tech government surveillance.

From the government’s standpoint, it will be nearly impossible to go back to a lower-tech alternative if this initiative does not succeed, so these cameras also mean a redefining of what it means for law enforcement to do their job. They signal an increasing dependence on computers and automation to replace human labor and judgment. And will the cameras actually change Australians’ culture around traffic safety? If so, how?

Time will tell whether the introduction of these cameras is a good thing in the end, but as always it is much bigger than just the adoption of one system.

Another writer exposes the terrible downsides of a new technology — but keeps using it!

Not only did Alli Conti get scammed on Airbnb, she uncovered a big ring of scams that exploit baked-in security weaknesses of the site, its rules, and the expectations of its users. But…

Even after a month of digging through public records, scouring the internet for clues, repeatedly calling Airbnb and confronting the [scammer] who called himself Patrick, I can’t say I’ll be leaving the platform, either. Dealing with Airbnb’s easily exploitable and occasionally crazy-making system is still just a bit cheaper than renting a hotel.

Conti’s message to Airbnb is effectively “Don’t worry about fixing these problems, I’ll keep using your site anyway so long as an Airbnb is marginally cheaper than alternatives.” Not counting all the indirect costs, of course.

I suspect there’s something else going on under the surface: a reluctance to go back to reserving rooms in hotels, simply because it is the “old way”. It doesn’t feel as hip or fresh or exciting — or dare I say fashionable? — to book a room in a hotel, and it doesn’t fit the narrative people have told themselves about what travel is supposed to look like in 2019. But that is a narrative, and not only is it an arbitrary one, it’s harmful in the case of people who are unwilling to change their consumer behavior in response to serious problems.

Should we be concerned about Maria Farrell?

The title of this post is tongue-in-cheek of course, but in an article at the Conversationalist, Maria Farrell compares smartphones to abusive partners by listing a bunch of things abusive partners do and claiming smartphones do those same things (quote):

• They isolate us from deeper, competing relationships in favour of superficial contact – ‘user engagement’ – that keeps their hold on us strong. Working with social media, they insidiously curate our social lives, manipulating us emotionally with dark patterns to keep us scrolling.
• They tell us the onus is on us to manage their behavior. It’s our job to tiptoe around them and limit their harms. Spending too much time on a literally-designed-to-be-behaviorally-addictive phone? They send company-approved messages about our online time, but ban from their stores the apps that would really cut our use. We just need to use willpower. We just need to be good enough to deserve them.
• They betray us, leaking data / spreading secrets. What we shared privately with them is suddenly public. Sometimes this destroys lives, but hey, we only have ourselves to blame. They fight nasty and under-handed, and are so, so sorry when they get caught that we’re meant to feel bad for them. But they never truly change, and each time we take them back, we grow weaker.
• They love-bomb us when we try to break away, piling on the free data or device upgrades, making us click through page after page of dark pattern, telling us no one understands us like they do, no one else sees everything we really are, no one else will want us.
• It’s impossible to just cut them off. They’ve wormed themselves into every part of our lives, making life without them unimaginable. And anyway, the relationship is complicated. There is love in it, or there once was. Surely we can get back to that if we just manage them the way they want us to?

I agree with some of these, but not with the claim that it’s impossible to stop using smartphones. As someone who doesn’t use a smartphone, I am living testimony to the contrary. (Hasn’t Farrell ever met someone who doesn’t use a smartphone?)

This article, like a lot of the criticism of technology I’ve seen, contains a recurring theme: it articulates serious concerns about the technology but then stops short of saying we should discontinue our use of it. (Another instance of this was Cathy O’Neil’s book, Weapons of Math Destruction, which presented a strong case against the use of computer algorithms in finance, hiring, criminal justice, and other areas, but dismissed the notion that we ought to abandon them.) Why?

If Farrell knows her smartphone is doing all these horrible things, why does she still have a smartphone? Why isn’t she leading the charge to go back to simple phones and leave the serious computing to laptops and desktop machines? I would happily support her if she did that, and I could provide lots of good reasons to use a simple phone as well as answers to many of the anticipated objections. I honestly do think a significant migration from smartphones to simple phones would make the world a drastically better place, even with all the benefits of smartphones considered.

It could be that Farrell is herself a victim to the abuses she warns us about: maybe she’s isolated from deep relationships, and her social life is curated by her phone; maybe she lacks the willpower to curtail her use of her phone; maybe she’s taken in by the “love-bombing” whenever she tries to cut it out of her life; maybe she really is unable to manage her life without her phone. If these things were true, it would explain why she doesn’t end her article by calling for readers to ditch their smartphones: she knows her smartphone will discover the betrayal, and abuse her even worse.

In that case we should be concerned, and maybe even intercede on her behalf. If we followed her analogy, and her phone was like an abusive partner, the right thing to do would be to take away her phone so she can be safe. And then if she says “No, give me my phone back,” we should interpret it as a kind of Stockholm syndrome and continue to withhold the phone permanently, while setting her up with a simple phone with which she can have a healthier relationship.

But no, instead she resorts to daydreaming about what a Prince Charming smartphone would be like instead. “We have to imagine a future we want to live in so we can build it.” Just like you have to imagine the partner you want so you can change the abusive one you’ve got? I suppose that part of the analogy isn’t totally fair since phones really are designed from the ground up, but I think this hides a lot of complexity around what a smartphone is and how it’s even possible to bring them to market at an affordable price. The incentives on the part of the designers, manufacturers, businesspeople, retailers, and even consumers, just aren’t lined up in a way that would make the phone “loyal” to its owner.

Farrell seems to admit this when she says that to make these utopian phones a reality “[w]e can pay the full cost of them”, but is that true? Who is “we”? I can’t imagine what the “full cost” would be, or that anyone who isn’t rich would be willing or able to pay it.

Near the end of the article she reminds us again that smartphones and the services running on them fall into the category of “life-critical public goods”, like clean drinking water.

Does this mean she thinks I need a smartphone? Maybe in some weird inversion of the scenario I described above, instead of her smartphone being taken away, she thinks somebody ought to take away my flip phone and force me to use an iPhone or Android instead. No thanks, Ms. Farrell: I am not technologically destitute, and you are not a technology victim. You have a choice.

Same goes for any smartphone user reading this.

Andrew Yang wants to reduce harm to children caused by smartphones

(Note: currently no presidential candidate reflects most of my views, and I do not yet know whether or for whom I will vote. When I do, I certainly will not write about it here! As I hope will be obvious, this blog post is not an endorsement or disavowal of anyone. Instead it is ultimately about the technology discussion itself.)

As far as I am aware, Andrew Yang is the only presidential candidate talking about the negative impact of smartphones on kids. He seems to take a research-first approach, which is encouraging to see. His goals are:

– Work to understand emerging technologies impact on human health and behavior
– Find a way to promote responsible smartphone usage, both within the industry and within the users
(from https://www.yang2020.com/policies/effects-smartphones-human-development/)

He does refer to some statistics without citing them, and he does make some bold claims without referring to any known statistics. Sample quote:

Teenagers are spending more time worrying about whether their online acquaintances like their recent post than they are in person with their friends hanging out and developing social skills. The average teenager spends Friday nights at home, interacting with a machine, instead of out with friends at a game or event.

But that is from his campaign website after all; he is an aspiring politician, not a researcher. He also says some things that resonate with me:

Those who have worked within the industry describe the work they’ve done in stark terms. Often relating apps to slot machines, they say that the smartest minds of a generation are spending their time getting teenagers to click on ads and obsess over social media posts to see how many acquaintances respond or react to their posts.

In short, many experts are worrying that the widespread adoption of a poorly understood technology have destroyed the psyches of a generation.

Less inspiring to me is his proposed solution to create a Department of the Attention Economy that “focuses specifically on smartphones and social media, gaming and chat apps and how to responsibly design and use them, including age restrictions and guidelines.” And he wants Tristan Harris to lead it. I’m skeptical that regulation will be effective and efficient, or produce the desired outcome. I’m pretty sure the very concept of “the attention economy” is Harris’s invention, and it’s contestable and unproven.

From a policy standpoint, I’d much rather see a long-term education and public service campaign that simply discourages parents from giving smartphones to their children, and perhaps even from owning them themselves without a specific compelling reason.

Still, I’m glad Yang is talking about this, and that the notion of putting restrictions around computing technology usage is on the table. (I’d prefer them to be culturally rather than legally enforced, but I guess you have to start somewhere.) My hope is it will inspire other candidates to respond, and that this topic will become part of the national conversation.

Of course, the risk is that these issues will be politicized, and that the solutions people support will be mostly predicted by which party or candidate they support, and that would be a terrible outcome. In fact, I think it’s likely to happen. So in some ways, I’m also really horrified that Andrew Yang is talking about this!

All the more reason why it should be a conversation first and foremost within the technology industry.

Stop pathologizing change resistance!

Change Management professionals are fond of pointing out humans’ many cognitive biases, which contribute to people’s supposed resistance to various kinds of change. Reference is also often made to the fact that most categories of human emotion are negative, and that change is threatening to people for a long list of emotional reasons related to things like status, or the feeling of insecurity that comes with having to learn to perform tasks in a new way.

It’s easy to come away from these messages with a picture of change resisters as damaged, fragile victims, who respond to change only with irrational defensive emotions, and who need to be “managed“, “dealt with“, “addressed” (and compared to toddlers!), and “overcome“.

In my career I have listened to countless people within various organizations tell me about workplace changes they resisted. In every single case these accounts centered around specific, often tangible negative impacts and interactions the changes were causing: doctors were forced by a new electronic records system to interact primarily with screens instead of patients; accountants had to do double entry in a new piece of software that was confusing and error-prone; engineers found their new ordering tool required them to enter extra, redundant search information while producing results that were unhelpful and irrelevant.

Without talking to people like this and hearing their stories, one could get the impression they were just being pulled along by their familiarity bias, or that they were simply fearful of the loss of status that the newly implemented systems represented. Their condition, one might think, is unfortunate, but ultimately they need to (in the words of one change leader I overheard) “get over it.”

In reality, people seem to usually resist change for good reasons: the new thing is flawed; the new thing is incomplete; the new thing is not communicated about effectively or truthfully; the new thing is not needed; the new thing is not the right solution; the new thing provides a worse interaction experience than the old thing; no training on the new thing was provided, or it was provided at the wrong time, or the training was of low quality; no support for the new thing was offered; etc.

Furthermore, over my years of interviewing people, everyone I’ve asked about workplace change has expressed some variant of this realistic and positive attitude: “Change is inevitable, and I do my best to adapt to it even if I don’t always like it.” Most people I’ve talked to could name both positive and negative workplace technology changes they’d experienced, as well as both technology changes that were forced on them and ones they undertook of their own will.

Pathologizing change resistance is especially damaging because it gives managers and executives the idea that they ought not to question or challenge the latest trends, lest they be found to be suffering the same pathologies as their Luddite employees. This contributes to a kind of Emperor’s New Clothes problem. In the end it’s everyone — not just the “emperor” — who bears the brunt of the bad decision to adopt the change.

The way to avoid this problem is to stop treating change resisters as obstacles, and instead use them as a front-line resource. Some texts give only the merest lip service to seriously engaging change resisters (for example, the 100-page book “The Eight Constants of Change” devotes exactly one paragraph to it) and even then, it is typically done as an afterthought. That is a backward approach.

The people identified as change resisters are really the ones who have the answers to questions like:

• “What change does our organization actually need to make?”
• “What are we doing well and should keep doing?”
• “What makes this organization a place where people want to work?”
• “What factors go into a successful change?”

These are the kinds of questions that need to be answered before any significant workplace change is considered, which means the so-called change resisters should be engaged right at the beginning, and their considerations taken seriously.

If nothing else, giving employees the impression they are not heard is a way to ensure that a workplace change will fail.

Data analytics, change, and ethics

Much ado is made about data-driven decision-making. Why do things the old-fashioned way with reports written by slow humans when you can make decisions based on vast quantities of realtime data compiled by automated systems, displayed in the most (ostensibly) helpful ways?

The firehose of data from which we are encouraged to drink, and to which our own activity contributes and from which others then drink and act, has a mixed reputation. Nobody would argue that informed decision-making is worse than flying blind, and in certain cases the “more data=better” curve really is a linear diagonal up and to the right. But at the same time, most people instinctively recoil from the collection and use of data in a growing set of instances where it feels invasive, unnecessary, and even “creepy.”

Take the well-known case (perhaps somewhat mythologized at this point) of the dad who found out his teenage daughter was pregnant because the big-box retailer Target tracked the daughter’s shopping habits and, identifying her as pregnant, proactively sent baby formula coupons to the household. It may be true that the dad would have had other more direct opportunities to find out about his daughter’s pregnancy eventually, but most people still see what happened as a violation of some kind.

Target was taking advantage of all the data available to them in order to maximize revenue, just as all businesses are coached to do, with the result that they intruded upon a delicate family situation and maybe even crossed a line with respect to privacy and ethics. To what extent are other companies taking notice of this and learning lessons from it?

The language of change management is often fatalistic: “This is what the future is going to look like, this is where your industry is headed, so you’d better do X or else get left behind.” This creates an environment where it’s easy to forget that even the biggest overarching changes are built from decisions made at the most granular levels, and that we actually have control over our technology choices. “No thanks” is always on the table even if we aren’t thinking about it.

The urgency with which companies are coached to adopt the latest technologies is not necessarily valid. Sometimes it’s better to hang back and wait, or at least to implement a change gradually and cautiously, so that the ethical boundaries of the new technology can be figured out and adhered to. It might be better for the bottom line to ask forgiveness rather than permission, but it isn’t always the right thing to do, and it can get you into trouble later on.