Digital Superstitions & Digital Transformations
Maybe you still hit Ctrl+S to save a document, even though the document is auto-saving? Or eject a USB stick when you can just pull it out? Maybe you have little routines every time you use your work computer. These are digital superstitions. At the scale of an enterprise, these little superstitions, can hamper digital transformations and reduce productivity.
These digital superstitions weave together a fascinating story around human psychology, cultural transmission and the unexpected emotional relationship we have with digital machines. There's that damned lizard brain again!
Most often, these rituals are formed based on our earlier emotional experiences with a given technology. In the days of saving everything to a disc, constantly, crashes and lost work were inevitable. That was painful. This created an emotional memory one where people will still hit the save icon or Ctrl+S often without thinking about what they're doing.
Our brains too, prefer cognitive efficiency. We prefer established patterns over constant adaptations. This then plays into cultural norms and behaviours. Nor do we always use a tool for the purpose for which it was designed. Rarely are technology adoption habits linear.
We all build mental models for how we work and play, with each other and with technologies. These mental models are resilient and persistent, making it harder to adapt when technologies can leap ahead by generations. It's part of the reason digital transformations fail in businesses. This can be termed as "structural resistance".
When you add up these little superstitions, it can be much harder for new features to be adopted, which can lead to slower adoption of new tools being rolled out. Unfortunately few UX designers and developers understand this. They see the obvious benefit from a logical perspective. Humans however, aren't always logical. Such as having these superstitions.
For marketers of technology products, they'll expend a lot of budget and time promoting new features, yet struggle. Largely because they've not considered that not only do people need to learn new features and processes, they have to unlearn. Including getting over superstitions. It means having to provide emotional bridges between old and new behaviours.
The cumulative impact of all these little superstitions, at just a few extra seconds per task, can add up fairly quickly to equal significant productivity losses across an enterprise. Some people will ignore new features, or develop workarounds based on their superstitions, creating effective shadow systems.
In larger organisations, be it business or governments, one can often find "cultural islands", such as departments and teams that have evolved their own practices and systems. They may cling to outdated workflows while others around them adopt new approaches.
One result of all this is that on the surface, management may think adoption of a new technology is going well, when in reality entrenched superstitions and practices are just working around the new technology, distorting adoption analytics.
There can be significant economic implications to these digital superstitions. Training and onboarding new employees can become a challenge as they learn the tacit "it's always been done this way" rules.
Employees get used to working with ERP software for example, often having to develop workarounds. This often happens when implementing new applications and iterations, thus slowing down adoption and devaluing a new tool or platform.
Another issue can be decision latency as a result of added or seemingly unnecessary steps. This can create institutional latency which compounds across the organisation at scale.
IT can end up spending more time managing issues arising from these superstitions, rather than dealing actual technical issues.
It's hard to understand all these little digital superstitions and almost impossible to map them all, especially in a large enterprise. Adding this mindset in when doing workflow analysis or a workplace ethnography can help to identify cultural islands and some superstitions over time. Just being aware of them can help in development, implementations and training.
Digital transformations are complex enough, with over 70% of them failing. Good awareness can help though.
