Communication of Innovations: A Cross-Cultural Approach
There are a few people whose name is synonymous with the study in a field. For me, Everett Rogers is that name for change. Communication of Innovations: A Cross-Cultural Approach is a follow up to his Diffusion of Innovations book that many people quote without even realizing it. If you’ve ever talked about laggards or the adoption curve, you’re speaking of his work.
Roger’s career took him many places, from Iowa to Ohio to Michigan, California, and New Mexico with brief stints of lecturing in Columbia, France, Mexico, Germany, and Singapore. While Diffusion of Innovations was focused on the US and the adoption of farming innovations, this work is focused on how the lessons learned in Iowa cornfields might apply more broadly to farming across the world.
Meeting People Where They Are At
When you’re trying to change behavior, you can’t start from the position where you want people to be. You must start from where they actually are. Experts want to share their knowledge with the uneducated, and in doing so, they expose their differences. As we gain experience, we build more elaborate and higher fidelity models of how something works. (See Sources of Power.) The problem, as Efficiency in Learning and The ABCs of How We Learn explain, is that the learners cannot process the messages, because their model isn’t sufficiently complete and nuanced. They get lost quickly, and as a result, they disengage. (See also The Adult Learner.)
As change agents entered villages that had become disconnected from the rest of the world, they tried to teach germ theory to the villagers – and it was too much for them to process. They couldn’t understand how tiny bugs could impact them.
Another, related problem, is a failure to understand and account for the local customs. Boiling water is a simple intervention that will kill the microbes that can harm people. It’s a place where you can avoid the discussion of germ theory and simply describe the behavior – unless the culture has a hot-cold distinction. In another case, the innovation of boiling water was rejected, because the culture associated hot with sickness. Thus, it made no sense to make something hot to make it healthy.
Difficult situations like this may require the gradual teaching about pathogens in ways that are visible to the people you’re trying to change the behavior of. Don’t forget that Fleming’s discovery of penicillin was an accident because he saw mold growing.
Berlo’s SMCR Model of Communication
Rogers shares Berlo’s model of communication, built on four steps:
- Source – Sender
- Message – The content
- Channels – The medium of the communication
- Receiving – The receiving individual
Important to this model is that every component can interact with the others to produce desirable – and sometimes undesirable – results.
The model itself has limitations, including the lack of feedback. It’s treated as an isolated event devoid of context or patterns. It doesn’t explicitly address noise that may occur in any component and simplifies the process to a simple linear progression.
Many of these objections can be addressed by recognizing that this communication is much like the packetization of messages that happens on computer networks. Each SMCR can be considered a packet that travels linearly through the system in one direction. When we consider multiple packets of communication happening, we can see non-linearity, feedback, and the complexity that the model itself doesn’t surface.
Consequences
The consequences of a successful change will fall somewhere inside of three separate classifications:
- Functional/Dysfunctional – Will the overall consequences to the social system be desirable or undesirable for the system? Will they move things forwards or backwards?
- Direct/Indirect – Will the consequences come as a direct result of the change, or will they come from the results of the results?
- Manifest/Latent – Will the members of the system recognize the consequences or not?
At some level, the results will be a roll of the dice. It’s possible to influence some of the outcomes, but the outcomes still are just a probability.
Opinion Leaders and Change Agents
As change agents are deployed to their jungles – even if they’re a corporate jungle – they are necessarily somewhat different than their target audience. They clearly are more educated in the target innovation. But they differ in other ways as well. Effective change agents have developed skills for empathy and listening either because they come from the target group they’re trying to create change in or through techniques designed to develop understanding. (For example, see The Ethnographic Interview.)
Opinion leaders are generally more exposed to communications both from the mass media and through relationships with diverse groups. They tend to have higher social status – either because of their position or because of the respect they’ve earned. They also, perhaps by nature of their relative affluence, are more open to innovation.
The relationship is symbiotic in that opinion leaders need to show their ability to innovate to be perceived as a leader, and change agents are often incapable of the change without the support of the opinion leader. One of the tensions in the relationship is the rate of change. Opinion leaders can be stripped of their ability to lead if their constituents believe they’re no longer enough like them or interested in their interests. Change agents can overuse opinion leaders and thereby remove the power that they were engaged for in the first place.
Diffusion Research Traditions
Rogers outlines what he believes are seven major diffusion research traditions:
- Anthropology
- Early sociology
- Rural sociology
- Education
- Medical sociology
- Communication
- Marketing
The reason for making these categories is to be able to identify the way that the researchers approached the problem of innovation. Often, the methods of data gathering differ, as does the unit of analysis. Communication of Innovations is a synthesis of what has been learned from these traditions.
Teaching the Innovation
One of the key catalysts for learning is an understanding of the big picture. In information architecture and learning alike, we need to be able to understand how the information is structured. (For information architecture, see Infonomics; for learning, see The Adult Learner.) One of the common problems with change approaches is that they fail to show the big picture of how the change will be positive for them (relative advantage) and what must be done (at a high level) for those benefits to be achieved.
If you’re trying to persuade someone to adopt an innovation, start with the big picture benefits, and then help them understand how those results are achievable.
Dissatisfaction
When a change agent approaches someone with an innovation for adoption, there’s a desire to create some dissatisfaction in the mind of that person. It’s the dissatisfaction with the status quo that will provide the energy for the change. However, sometimes the dissatisfaction doesn’t stay channeled in the way that change agents might prefer. The dissatisfaction may exceed the capacity of the person for change.
One form of dissatisfaction, when “wants” outrun “gets,” is hard to manage. The person will alternate between overcommitment and overwhelm, making the process of adoption more difficult.
Underlying Conditions and Relationships
Sometimes, the first work of a change agent isn’t to propose a change or share the change they’re interested in getting people to adopt. Sometimes, the first step is working to change the general attitude, so that people more favorably view any kind of change. It may involve the introduction of some smaller changes that can be successfully implemented with less resistance and greater initial reward. These kinds of approaches are particularly necessary when previous innovations and change attempts have failed. Trust must be built as a starting point.
It’s all about the relationships that people have with change – and the relationships they have with each other. Taking the time to build a bit of trust can go a long way to improving the chances for change to be successful.
Immunity to Change
It’s quite common for someone to say one thing and then do another. It’s entirely possible for someone to profess their commitment to a change and for them to fail to make the changes necessary. Sometimes, there are unconscious beliefs or counter-commitments that prevent the change from happening. (See Immunity to Change.) These counter-beliefs are difficult to identify because they’re not subject to conscious control.
Noise and Discontinuity
We’ve experienced a global pandemic that radically changed the adoption of many things. Work from home jumped. Telemedicine became accepted. Some school systems did away with snow days (because kids can just do their work at home). These big events create discontinuities in the adoption of technologies, repressing some and jump-starting others.
These discontinuities can’t be anticipated or relied upon. Instead, we need to plan for the mundane immediacy of reward and the relative advantage. In these spaces, our changes must find ways to demonstrate clear value. The longer between the change and the result, the more impactful it must be. If it’s not a substantial advantage, it may get lost in the noise floor of random results.
Failure Is Necessary
The innovators must accept that their super innovativeness must be paid for by the occasional failure. If we’re going to make something new, we must accept that sometimes we’ll fail. Sometimes, those failures will hurt. The innovators must plan for failures, because without failures, we can’t create anything meaningful.
Homophily
The degree to which people in the target for change are similar the greater the likelihood of success and, generally, the faster the rate of change. As Richard Hackman points out in Collaborative Intelligence, homophily has both advantages and disadvantages. It tends to have fewer creative ideas – but that is what most adoptions need.
Adoption and Decision Units
Often, the people making an innovation decision differ from those who will implement the decision when the decision is being made from an authority rather than optional or collective decisions. The gap between those who will implement the decision and those who make the decision opens the innovation up to subversion. Those who are asked to implement the decision may, rightly, decide that the invention was “not invented here” and rebel against it. (See Advice Not Given and Collaboration for more.)
Subversion is a powerful force that can derail the most well-intended change. As a result, it’s a good idea to ensure that both the adoption and the decision units are in concurrence about the implementation of the innovation – including the changes it will mean for them.
In one example shared in the book, programmed instruction was introduced to schools to allow students to work at their own pace. However, the teachers expected to be leading instruction and subverted the innovation so they could control the pace of learning in their classrooms. The result was worse performance, not better.
Form, Function, and Meaning
Change agents can command a great deal of technical knowledge about the innovation itself, including the mechanisms it operates on and the way that it functions. But ultimately, it’s the person implementing the innovation who must decide what the innovation means to them. Rogers recounts Lawrence Sharp’s Steel Axe Heads for Stone-Age Australians research as he used in Diffusion of Innovations as well as other examples where the effects of an innovation were not predictable. In some cases, the long-term impact of implementing an innovation was worse results – the opposite of what was initially experienced.
While there is a substantial overlap with Diffusion of Innovations, there’s something to be said for how one approaches Communication of Innovations.