Will your employees or customers adopt the new technology you are building?
It is a question that probably does not get asked enough, because in a transformation or change project we move quickly to implementation and to use what is trendy without understanding how people will be involved in the process.
I really like this quote by the CEO of BOI (Board of Innovation) in their "AI Strategy Playbook" regarding what you should invest on people and change.
See, we can't just simply tell ourselves and believe that after we have this new AI (or whatever emerging technology) our employees and customers will for sure use it or that it will have the outcomes we are hoping for in our organization.
In fact, you could have the opposite and cause unintended consequences.
We need to really put people at the center and understand just what basic human needs we are serving and how behavior and it's drivers will be enabled.
When I work on consulting projects, one of the first things my team does once we have defined the challenge and made sense of what we are working on is to look at the evidence and literature and see if there are any theories, models or frameworks that can help guide us.
Lets look at an example from a scientific paper: (A review of technology acceptance and adoption models and theories H. Taherdoost (2018))
In it we can see and explore theories that explain and predict human behavior related to technology adoption:
-Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT) -Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) -Technology-Information-Behavior (TIB) -Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) -Social Cognitive Theory (SCT)
These theories come from different fields such as sociology and social psychology and have been used to explain behavior in different contexts.
Some of these theories focus on the behavior of individuals, while others focus on adoption decisions that are influenced by organizational characteristics.
Additionally, some theories focus on the perceived outcomes when forecasting behavior while others focus solely on beliefs about the technology.
In order to increase our chances of getting better outcomes we should be more systematic, we should use the theory and evidence as good thinking tools and as our competitive advantage - to help us understand how these theories can be adapted to our context and to the change technology can create.
Going in blindly to address change is never going to be a good strategy....