Explaining the adoption cycle with personality types

First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.   ― Nicholas Klein

Ever since I saw the adoption cycle for innovation I have been fascinated with it. Often being among the early adopters and occasionally among the innovators, I have found that this recurring pattern reflects rarely really well.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not always among the innovators or early adopters. In fact, when it came to owning the first cell-phones (flip-phones) I was a laggard among my friends because as an introvert I really dislike phone calls and I was really put off by how mobile phones were becoming status symbols.

However, in general, I am among the early adopters and innovators and as a teacher, I have won several prizes and awards for innovative use of technology in the classroom. Not many teacher colleagues share my enthusiasm for technology and its potential for innovative teaching scenarios. I have met a few others like me, but it’s usually less than a handful of teachers per school. So, the 2.5% mark seems totally correct in my area of expertise. For many smaller schools, it would mean that there is a single or no even one geek teacher like me, which explains why schools are only slow to adopt the technology. I am not talking about MS Word and web browsing here, but such ideas as digital portfolios and flipped classrooms.

What makes people differ in their attitudes towards new technology. The biggest difference is whether they are visionaries (they see the real future potential) or pragmatists (they see that the technology isn’t advanced enough yet to be really useful in the present). Plus, a lot of pragmatists are really conservative in their attitude: an innovation has not only to be more useful than the true and tried method, but it has to be MUCH more useful. In fact, most conservative people would adopt an innovation only when the majority of people already have adopted it (bandwagon effect), because these very same people also tend to be conformists.

Visionaries, on the other hand, often have no immediate gain from the innovation, on the contrary, they often invest time and money in something that does not yield any returns in the present. They often have two motivations for that:

• they are playful and fascinated by current possibilities and are not motivated by any practical gains
• they see the future potential and practical gains

Whoever has an idea of the Myers-Briggs personality types can immediately identify the two types: visionaries are intuitive/N types (high in personality trait openness) and the pragmatists are practical sensor/S types. Between them there is the famous “Chasm”, a huge gap in the adoption cycle. The last group of laggards and non-adopters are an interesting mixed group, made up by die-hard S conservatives and N non-conformists.

Having established a matching pattern between adoption types and personality types we can now explain another interesting phenomenon in innovation adoption, that is known as Amara’s Law (named after the American scientist and futurologist Roy Amara):

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run

This seeming paradox can be resolved when making explicit that “we” here refers to two different groups of people:

a) visionaries tend to overestimate the effect of innovation in the short run

b) pragmatists tend to underestimate the effect of innovation in the long run

The innovator’s dilemma is that they often invest more in their innovations than they can possibly make from their returns when the adoption cycle is very long. More than one famous innovator died in poverty, Tesla, Gutenberg, Van Gogh and Edison are only some of the more widely known examples. This illustrates that innovators are not usually driven by material interests. In fact, many innovators were driven by a deep concern to make the world a better place for humankind.

Dedicated to Adrienn, a visionary