Brains, and humans, like patterns. Our brains are wired to lay down neural pathways and then to encourage us, via clever deployment of hormones like cortisol and dopamine, to stick to those pathways. Your brain knows that if you do what has kept you safe before you’ll probably stay safe in the future.
Your brain is full of eight lane superhighways, side roads, and garden paths that guide every choice you make. Brains really resist burning energy to pave new neural pathways – paving is a process that takes lots of time and effort. That’s why change is so hard for all of us – for individuals, for teams, for corporations, or for whole cultures.
But you have a great new product, a great new idea. You are all about bringing change! How can you get your customers to adopt your amazing new vision and product? How can you get them so excited about what you have to offer that they’ll pave new pathways?
Peter Denning and Robert Dunham’s The Innovators Way is my favorite book on this topic. Here’s what they say: “Innovation is the adoption of a new practice in a community…Innovation does not cause adoption. It is adoption.”
Denning and Dunham remind us that when you stand up and tell the world you’re going to solve a problem, it’s “not an event, it is a process.” You keep offering, you keep encouraging people to try, you keep asking them to adopt.
After they’ve adopted, you are nowhere near done. You have to get them to sustain the effort of change. “People will abandon an innovation if the costs of sustaining it are too high.” This is when education and training, customer service, tools, and maintenance become so important. This is when “Leaders and managers frequently articulate the value of the new practice and track whether value’s being delivered.”
You are a cheerleader and a problem-solver to everyone who’s trying to pave the new neural pathway that your wonderful innovation requires. Paving is a slow, time-consuming process, but it’s the only true path to change!
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