Why do some innovations spread so rapidly? Their viral adoptions and super-scaling are the kinds of stories writers love to write about and readers love to read about. The success and popularity of ever-scaling technology products and services like the iPhone, Facebook, Twitter and Pintrest to name a few are clamoring for replication in other industries like education, healthcare and global poverty.
Atul Gawande in the July 29, 2013 issue of the New Yorker states in his article entitled “Slow Ideas: Some innovations spread fast. How do you speed the one’s that don’t?” says that we prefer “turnkey” solutions such as “instructional videos to teachers, drones to troops, incentives to institutions. People and institutions can feel messy and anachronistic.”
Consider how much technology in education is bypassing schools and even teachers altogether and going directly to students. But Gawande aptly points out whether it is adopting better, more effective practices in medicine (i.e. think of how anesthesia or sterilization techniques in hospitals required mass adoption to improve survival rates) or education (student centered, competency based learning), technology and incentives are insufficient.
Mass media can introduce people to a new idea, but for adoption to take place, communications scholar Everett Rogers says diffusion “is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation”.
Gawande says that people follow people they know and trust. This is something effective sales people know well. In interviewing pharmaceutical sales reps, individuals tasked with getting doctors to change their behavior and adopt a new drug, Gawande found that they follow the “rule of seven touches”. If a sales rep personally touches a doctor seven times (i.e. face-to-face) they will come to know you and possibly trust you, and if and only if they trust you will they begin to change.
This seven-touch approach is too often viewed as not scalable. How can a particular technology vendor spend sufficient time and resources at a classroom level to enable 7 personal touches with a teacher or student? This seems both incredibly time consuming and costly. This is also what people first thought about the creation of anesthesiology and its subsequent need to double the number of doctors in every operation.
However, as Gawande points out, this is exactly how worldwide adoption of new healthcare standards in antiseptic standards in the late 19th century occurred when American surgeons flew to Germany and spent time with their German counterparts to learn. This is how labor delivery birth checklists were adopted in rural hospitals in India by nurses spending time with local birth attendants to observe their current non-checklist practices and building relationships with them, This is also how we increased American farmers’ crop yields by sending thousands of agriculture extension agents directly to the farms to spend time with the farmers so they could see firsthand what current barriers existed before introducing the new techniques.
Want your product to go viral? Spend time one-on-one building enough personal touches with your intended user to gain their trust because people only follow people they trust. This is why at Matchbook Learning we spend the majority of our staff’s time in the classroom watching and listening, asking and exploring how the various technologies being deployed are working.
