Author: Mike Urgo
In the early nineties, when I was in grade school, my dad bought our first family computer. It was a Compaq, and I wasn’t allowed to use it, unless I was playing DOOM with my dad. While my dad wasn’t always buying the latest tech, growing up, he embraced it and loved that I was into it.
However, when I got my first Lego Mindstorms set in 1998, I started to leave him behind. He had accepted that technology was growing, but he was no longer embracing the effort it took to learn and keep up with it. Was he curious? Yes. But he slowly started to lose touch with the newer tech.
After spending time with more and more people, and hearing from industry experts, we are all now at a very special moment in time. I look at my dad as an example. Years ago, I bought him and my mom an Amazon Echo Show, so we could call from our house on video, and they could talk to us and the kids. We never used it, and I found out today that he didn’t even really try and set it up.
He just gave it away. Not because he doesn’t think it works, not because he doesn’t believe in it. It just has become overwhelming for him.
From a change management perspective, he isn’t averse to the changing world, but he isn’t motivated to embrace the technology and therefore won’t adopt it.
I just got home from a cool trip where I was in high-level discussions around the state of technology and the speed at which things are changing, specifically in the AI space. I was so excited, I got home and started talking to my wife and kids about some of the new things that are happening with AI, specifically around Gemini and other language learning models.
I was surprised that both my wife and kids turned up their nose and said: “That’s weird”.
It stopped me in my tracks.
Here we have a tool being developed, where the possibilities are endless, yet our knee jerk reaction both inside and outside of work is: “That’s weird”, or “I don’t know about that”, or “I don’t think it will work for us”.
Here’s my challenge for you this week as leaders, whether you work in tech or our tech adjacent (sorry to break it to you, if you are reading this, you use technology):
Embrace the changes that are coming.
Embracing the change doesn’t mean it needs to be adopted or leveraged right away. But embrace it, make sure you understand it, because if you don’t, you will be left behind. Not because you can’t learn or catch up, but because the longer you wait, the more overwhelming it will be.
My dad came down while I was playing a new Madden game on PlayStation and asked him to play. The last games he was playing had only a few buttons and one page of instructions. After one half of trying to explain the game play to him, he gave up. It was too much, and it wasn’t fun for him. I remember desperately trying to get him to try again with no success.
I am smiling to myself, because on my flight home, I opened my Steam Deck and started playing Disney Dreamlight Valley. To be honest, it’s a fun game. But more than that, it’s what my daughters are playing and I don’t ever want to be left behind.
When I say left behind, for me, it’s everything: left behind in my kid’s interests or apps, in my own recreational interests (like photography), or in my professional life. It starts with embracing the change and it takes effort. I liken it to chores. When they are done consistently, it’s not terrible, but when you let it pile up, the chores can seem daunting to tackle. The same can be said for keeping up with technology. If you check out for even a brief period in time, especially right now, you will be left behind.
The next step is driving adoption, which will be next week’s topic: how to drive adoption of new technology.
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