When I was a young man, I believed that the good idea was what drove change. I believed that if you presented folks with a way to do things better or less expensively, they would embrace the improvement enthusiastically. I was wrong.
People didn't jump at my good ideas, or anyone else's. Instead they often dismissed the idea as unworkable or unreasonable, or fought it as if it were some great evil. That made me think that the folks who opposed innovation and change were either dumb or wrong-headed. I was wrong again.
People don't oppose innovation and change because they're dumb or crazy or just plain mean. Instead, they make their choices based on their experience and judgment and needs. They do this regardless of the magnitude of any possible improvement that change would bring to their organization.
You would think, for example, that an improvement that would increase efficiency by four or five hundred percent would be something everyone would support. You'd think it would be even more likely if the idea would increase chances of victory and save lives.
The breech-loading rifle offered just those kinds of possibilities around the beginning of America's Civil War. At that time, the standard Infantry weapon was a muzzle-loading rifle that used a paper cartridge to fire a lead bullet that was called a "minie ball." Soldiers would stand shoulder to shoulder and fire at the enemy. After firing, they would re-load.
The loading was done by ripping open the paper cartridge that contained a measured amount of powder. Most soldiers did this with their teeth. Then, the powder and the paper were dumped down the muzzle of the rifle, which was standing barrel up and butt down. After that, the minie ball was dropped down the barrel, and a ramrod was used to jam everything home.
After all of this, the soldier would pick up the rifle, put a percussion cap in and fire. Then the process would begin again. A well-trained soldier could manage about four rounds a minute with this kind of rifle. That rate went down if the fire fight was fairly long, because black powder residue tended to clog up the barrel.
It wasn't that breech-loaders were too new. They'd been invented almost half a century before. Several manufacturers offered breach-loading weapons at the war's beginning.
Breech-loaders had two big advantages over muzzle-loaders. The rate of fire was much higher. A soldier using a breech-loader could get off 12 to 15 rounds a minute. Not only that, you didn't have to stand up to load the thing. That meant that soldiers could kneel or lie down to make themselves a smaller target, or fire from behind trees or rocks.
Many field commanders, the ones on the front lines, wanted the army to adopt the breech-loaders. So did President Lincoln. But the new weapons were not adopted until well after the end of the war.
Why not? People opposed the change for several reasons, reasons that look a lot like what you'll run into if you try to change things in any organization.
The Ordnance Department, who supplied weapons for the Army, didn't want breech-loaders because they would increase the number and types of weapons and ammunition required. It would make their job harder.
Government accountants were worried that soldiers would fire a lot more rounds and wouldn't be as careful. They worried that the cost for ammunition would go up without an increase in efficiency.
All these folks also pointed out that the breech-loading technology was untested, unproved, more fragile, and less refined than muzzle loading. Many of them urged more study of the issue.
Then, there's a group with a very interesting perspective. Some officers noted that soldiers would be able to lie down and hide behind trees, and that would diminish an officer's potential control over them. They thought it was a bad idea.
The people who opposed the breech-loader opposed it for what they saw as good reasons. They opposed it based on what their current job was and how they saw it. They opposed it based upon the mission they had been given. They were unable to step back and view the overall mission of the Army.
That inability to step back is not a "failing." It's human nature. People view change through their own lens. The ordnance folks viewed it through an ordnance lens. The accountants chose an accounting lens.
Some of this is affected by what people imagine their job to be. The field officers who opposed the breech-loaders saw their job as controlling the troops. The ones who supported it saw their job as winning battles with minimum casualties.
We human beings make choices based on our own self-interest. You ignore that at your peril if you want to bring change to an organization or to the world. This is a particular problem for folks who seem to generate lots of ideas.
Those idea generators are usually very good at turning out ideas and so that's what they want to keep on doing. The result is that they often take their ideas, dump them at the feet of folks in operations, and then walk away.
Come forward about 100 years from the Civil War for a good example. In the late sixties and early seventies, Xerox was the premier office equipment maker in the world. Until 1970 they had a monopoly on the office copier market and generated tons of profit from machine rentals.
They used some of that money to acquire companies and hire people they thought would keep them at the forefront of the market and continue their immense profitability. Several of those folks wound up in Palo Alto, California at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, more commonly called Xerox PARC.
The folks at Xerox PARC generated ideas and practical applications by the bushel. In fact many of the concepts and developments that became characteristics of the PC and Internet world began at Xerox PARC. Hardly any of them made money for Xerox, though.
By 1975, Xerox had the makings of the first practical, programmable small computer, called the Alto III. Had Xerox brought it to market as planned, in mid-1978, they would have beaten IBM by three years. Their system could have had a graphical user interface that used a pointing device, icons, and popup menus. The world would have been very different.
But Xerox didn't do it. After a couple of years of dueling cost studies, they killed the Alto project in 1978 and threw their corporate weight behind the Xerox 850. The 850 was essentially a typewriter with some memory, not the sort of thing to base a technological or profit-building revolution upon.
Why did Xerox go the way it did? There were all of the reasons we saw with the breech-loader, plus at least one more. Xerox wanted to stuff the Alto project into the Office Systems Division, without changing that division much at all.
The Xerox Office Systems Division made and sold typewriters and other non-copier office equipment. The folks at Office Systems understood how to make and sell typewriters. They did it well. They were paid good money to do it. Shoving the Alto into that division as Xerox planned to do it would have made it impossible for anyone to make bonus for a year or two. Naturally, they opposed the idea.
There were deeper issues, too. There were vast differences in culture and outlook between the two groups.
The Xerox PARC folks saw their job as producing good ideas. They had been praised for their ability to do that by all manner of professional colleagues. They did not see their job as helping Xerox build profit.
The Office Systems Division folks saw their job as making and selling office equipment. They had been praised and rewarded for their ability to do that. They did not see their job as helping Xerox develop options for a profitable future.
Each side thought the other was a bit of a jerk. The PARC folks thought that Bob Potter, who headed Office Systems, was a technological Neanderthal. They didn't think it was their job to educate him. Potter, in turn, thought the PARC folks were arrogant airheads, who didn't understand what it takes to make a company profitable. He didn't think it was his job to educate them.
Everybody lost. Xerox lost the opportunity for a stunning second act. The researchers lost the opportunity to see their work applied and celebrated. The world lost the real possibility of a personal computer revolution that started earlier and grew faster.
There are two lessons from all of this. The first is that human nature rules. Human beings do things for their own benefit. Human beings tend to see benefit in the things that have always brought them praise and pay. Human beings make decisions first emotionally, and then often dress them in the clothes of logic.
The second lesson is that if you want change to happen, you must be willing to do some of the heavy lifting involved in making it happen. It won't happen by itself. It won't happen just because your idea is good. It will only happen if you and other people see the good the change can do and work toward it.
This feature appeared on 29 October 2001
