It may seem impossible to help the last 16% of your organisation to adopt legal tech. In a product lifecycle, these 16% are called ‘laggards’: those who adopt innovation only after traditional ways of working became impracticable. Laggards obstruct your innovation efforts and are (therefore) expensive.
Similar percentages are found on the spectrums of (public) vaccination and of taking climate action: they’re called antivaxxers and climate deniers.
How to convince a climate denier, antivaxxer or laggard to take the right action (change their course of dealing)? Psychological research as discussed in Think again by Adam Grant, provides the answer.
The 16% of laggards
The 16% comes from the classic product lifecycle On the left part of the sinus curve are innovators and early adopters, reflecting 16% of an average group of people. It is thought that the last part of the sinus curve represents an equally large group, your laggards.
The 16% is somewhat academic (it may well be 12-14% or so). But if you are making a psychological mistake in driving change management, the percentage of obstructors and delayers will be much higher.
50 shades of grey: find the feeling
There is an abundance of research data regarding successfully convincing antivaxxers (to take a vaccine in the pursuit of public health). There is also an abundance of data on how-to be successful in driving climate action.
According to Adam Grant (and many other psychologists), being successful in your change management effort towards laggards has two aspects:
- A highly individualised, motivational interviewing style.
- Stop black-and-white communicating (show the six times 50 shades of grey).
In addressing these two aspects, you will find the feeling, which is crucial for successfully adopting legal tech.
1. Motivational interviewing
Laggards, like antivaxxers and climate deniers, have their own reasons to object or obstruct. Their objections are not necessarily rational or supported by facts. As a rational leader (or change manager responsible for driving adoption of legal tech), you want everyone to join your effort.
Convincing an antivaxxer to change their course of dealing requires a highly individualised approach. It entails applying three techniques:
- Ask open questions (like Socrates, but less abrasive).
- Listen reflectively.
- Reconfirm that the other wants to and can change.
2. Black-and-white communicating
Obstructive people are difficult to convince. If your communications strategy has been strongly emphasising the importance of innovation and embracing change, the more important it becomes to convince the last ones by making them decide themselves.
Black-and-white thinking can be very helpful. It helps structuring and simplifying complex challenges. For many people, like true innovators and early adopters, this is helpful in their decision-making and determining their behaviour. For them, if a challenge has six dimensions and on each dimension fifty shades of grey, black-and-white thinking is effective.
While black-and-white thinking can be effective for many, black-and-white communicating may be counterproductive for some. That’s because black-and-white communicating fails to reach a clime denier or laggard.
Regarding climate change, some six beliefs can be identified. And each of these six beliefs has dozens of nuances, maybe fifty shades of grey. These nuances cannot be addressed in black or white; someone who does so cannot convince, is the idea (of a laggard at the right end of the sinus curve).
Psychological research reveals that communicating in all nuances influences the bias of people. Therefore, to convince a laggard, antivaxxers or climate denier starts with your explicit acknowledgement that your aims have six dimensions with fifty shades of grey.
You should then continue to address all nuances – no surprise that you need to be explicit about the one grey shade that your laggard colleague embraced. To determine which shade of grey that is, requires some motivational interviewing. Identifying that one shade of grey enables you to shift the focus from the cause climate change to solving it.
Of course, to be successful in driving change management requires that you have the other eight parameters for successful change management in order.
More about the three dimensions of successful change management (each dimension subdivided in three parameters):
