Driving Technical Change

Who Are These Skeptics?

The skeptics are by and large your co-workers who are not using the tool or technique that you want them to adopt. Some don’t know about it. Some don’t care to know about it. Some know about it and just refuse. Generally, skeptics tend to fall into patterns. I’ll go into detail later on the actual resistance patterns.

But what’s important to get now about the skeptics is that you need to figure out why they aren’t using the technique already or why they rebuff your attempts to introduce it. There are lots of reasons. Some may be technical, some may be political, and some are even personal if you can believe that. The important thing to do is to put yourself in their shoes and try to figure out where they are coming from. ...