Closing the Innovation Adoption Gap
Why do individual people adopt innovations much faster than (public) organizations?
Picture this: you are sitting in a government office. Waiting to get your driver's license renewed or your home address updated in the local registry. You booked the appointment two months earlier because that was the only slot open in the offices closest to your home. You are looking at the screen calling the turns. Holding tight the many documents that required several trips and steps to collect. You only take your eyes off the screen to fill out the two additional forms that the security guard at the entrance told you to complete. A couple of things weren’t clear in the instructions, but the guard could not help and there was no one else available, so you decided to fill it to the best of your knowledge. When you finally sit down, the - gentle but inflexible, and understandably bored - officer tells you that you’ve made a mistake and that you need to fill one of the forms again. Please take another ticket. X4ZL3. Another 30 minutes.
During this hour and a half, and despite your glued eyes to the rolling numbers on the screen, you have been able to send 15 emails, reviewed several work-related documents and prepared an outline for a presentation you need to have ready for the following day. And you are not a particularly tech-savvy person, but these tools are so easy to use. Even for you. Probably for the officer facing you too.
So, you ponder as you finally leave the office with your shiny new license in your hand, why don’t government officers use these tools to make our life - mine and theirs - a bit less frustrating? Why do organizations - and public ones in particular - take so long to adopt these innovations?
People that know what they are talking about - this is their job - have given me four reasons that explain this “innovation adoption gap”.
First, individuals, you and I for example, often adopt a technology for a specific use. We take it, try it, and if it works for our purposes, we keep using it. It’s relatively easy to change a workflow based on a new application, and yet, if we postpone using it, is mainly because we hesitate to change our ways. Routines are sticky. But sometimes we are in the mood, and we try. We adapt, and if that doesn’t work, we either drop the tool, going back to our old ways, or switch to another one. This may mean that we stop sending docs as attachments and send links instead. Or that we first run something by ChatGPT or Claude.AI and then paste it into a Google doc, before saving it as a Word doc into a synced dropbox folder that we then send as an attachment. Or, if you are an early adopter (or under 30), you just use Notion. The point is that we continue trying different tools, adding or dropping steps to workflows. This trial and error can be fairly idiosyncratic. Each person’s routines change and adapt. But we don’t really need to switch computers or the technological infrastructure, nor convince anyone that they need to change their routines either.
Organizations, by contrast, need to coordinate processes across several people. Colleagues and supervisors need to keep at least some insight into what is going on and where things are filed. Version control is a thing. As a result, there are norms and practices for what platforms to use, in what way, how things are labelled, how inputs and outputs are checked for quality…. We need guidelines! Let alone security protection requirements. If the new thing demands changes to the tech stack or its architecture, then the hurdles are even harder to overcome.
This affects any organization, but government entities have more stakeholders, stricter oversight and procurement processes, and additional privacy and security requirements, making them uniquely complex when it comes to adjusting processes and structures to new things.
A second factor stems from the speed of transformation. Many innovations and tools are changing rapidly. Apps evolve, some of them every week, and others become obsolete in a matter of months. You can subscribe or unsubscribe to a service, or upgrade and update a tool fairly easily. And yet sometimes it’s hard to adapt to the new version of an app or simply let go of an old tool…. Now imagine altering processes, collective routines, labelling conventions and coordination meetings every couple of months. Sounds terrifying? That’s because it’s a nightmare. One filled with recurrent budget approvals for upgrades, trainings, guideline revisions, and security assessments…. No wonder people in charge of making organizational decisions around technology want to avoid sending out constant updates. They don’t want to email staff every four months, asking them to switch processes or tech stacks again. Their emails would be received with even more irritation than what they too often - and unjustly - already do.
Some of these requirements may be outdated or just serve a set of narrow interests and not the organization as a whole. But there are good reasons why some of these processes and guardrails exist too. A main one has to do with the stakes of failure. If your new productivity software fails to deliver expected benefits, you face limited consequences—perhaps a few hundred dollars lost and some wasted time before switching to an alternative. By contrast, a failed technology implementation in an organization can result in substantial financial - often in the millions - losses. Even worse, often what you lose is your credibility, brand name, or political capital. Remember healthcare.gov? Not to mention the potential harms to citizens’ lives and associated legal liabilities when governments make mistakes. The Robodebt scandal in Australia is a good example. In short, you better think it well before jumping too quickly to the new shiny thing.
To compound on these issues, in public organizations the people making decisions tend to index on all those worries and under-value the use cases. Why? Because the people making the decisions to purchase the technology are not the people using the innovations. IT or procurement departments are often the ones with the last word on the acquisition of a particular technology or innovation. The bug: their biggest worry is not whether that innovation will deliver the best value for the public official or the user, but whether it will mess up with the technology infrastructure, the security concerns, and the standards that they steward.
Sometimes, decisions not to adopt an innovation will be sound and rational from an organizational perspective: I’ve already explained why there are cost and risk considerations that, rightly, differ from those of individuals. But delays can also be the result of organizational inertia and cognitive biases, derived from the bounded-information or the incentives of those making decisions. When these incentives clash with the goals of the organization, something isn’t working and needs to change. For example, the users of the innovations should have a bigger say in the decision-making, and those just focused on the risks need to be accountable for the costs of no-adoption such as lower employee morale, erosion of citizen satisfaction or resource inefficiencies.
Yet, the misalignment between the organizational goals and the incentives of the people making the decisions is not always evident. An even if the gap is clear, the folks in power may be precisely the ones with the incentives not to change. They may rather hold their power just a little longer, even if that means sinking the ship down the line. This does not need to be a conscious and sinister decision. There is enough uncertainty about the future to justify the motives to oneself.
In sum, there are good and bad reasons why public organizations adopt innovations less rapidly than individuals. Weeding the right from the wrong is not clear-cut. And even when it is, change may involve - often does - messing with power, values, and routines.
This is the reason why too often we need to wait in line to receive a service that could take just a few clicks. Luckily, even if slowly, things are changing, and many transactions are much faster now that just a few years ago. I am sure they’ll continue to improve, and the first thing we need is a good diagnostics between what are the good - and not so good - reasons to delay the adoption of innovations. We may as well use the new tools at our disposal to develop such sound diagnostics… while we wait in line to get our driver’s license renewed!