There Are No
Laggards

In the 1950s, researchers studying how farmers took up new practices used a mix of names for the same groups. Iowa State College's extension researchers, for one, ended their list with “nonadopters.” In 1958 Everett Rogers proposed five names in a paper in Rural Sociology, and they stuck: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. His 1962 book, “Diffusion of Innovations,” made them famous.

The labels measure one thing: when a person adopts, compared with everyone else. A rollout meeting uses them to answer a different question, which is why.

Rogers later named the problem. His book took on the habit of blaming a person for a problem the system built, which researchers call individual-blame bias. About the group he'd named himself, he wrote in the fifth edition that “it is a mistake to imply that laggards are somehow at fault for being relatively late to adopt.”

A statistic about how fast something spreads makes a poor diagnosis of the person in front of you.

The person filed as a laggard has often run the numbers before the announcement ends. Learning a new system costs attention, and their attention is already spent. Turning down a tool that doesn't make today lighter is arithmetic. “Laggard” is the word for someone whose constraints went unmeasured. (“The Hardware of Being Human” runs that math in full.)

Bandwidth is one dial. The other is where a person's pride lives. For some it lives in the craft and the judgment only they bring. For others it lives in the result and how fast it lands. Cross the two and the room stops looking like a bell curve. It becomes four people in four states, and the same person moves between them as the week changes.

Each of those four people stays on the hook for the result. Each one loses part of the decision about how the result gets made. A decision lands on the overloaded person already made. The hours the fast one saved get filled with someone else's work. Careful reviewers take the blame for errors they weren't given time to catch, and the expert signs off on a process he's no longer allowed to look inside.

In 1979 Robert Karasek used national survey data from Sweden and the United States to find where mental strain at work piles up. It piled up in one place: heavy demands paired with little control over how to meet them.

A rollout raises the demand by design. Control is the dial that decides how it lands.

Karasek's finding points to a narrower test of dignity at work: having a say in the thing you'll be blamed for. Take the decision, leave the accountability, and the person becomes the name on the result when it breaks.

That cost stays off the dashboard. Speed shows up there. Cynicism doesn't. A person stripped of a say tends to stop doing the work nobody asked for: the catch, the early warning, the late save when the system fails. When it does fail, that person watches it happen and concludes that caring stopped being part of the job. The speed gain was a loan against the day the organization needs them most.

The newest tools make the trade easier to offer. They hand over the answer and keep the reasoning, so responsibility goes up while visibility goes down.

Before the next announcement, sort the room honestly. Who's out of bandwidth. Where each person's pride lives. Which decision is about to leave someone whose name will stay on the result.

The four states, the way people slide between them and the triggers that move them are mapped in the diagnostic model. Run it before the announcement. It costs less than the loan.