How to Make Your Team Adopt New Tools & Tech like GenAI
Hint: Don't Expect Juniors to Teach Senior Professionals
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āYou Canāt Teach an Old Dog New Tricksā
The biggest barrier to new tech & tool adoption isnāt budget constraints or lack of technical infrastructure - itās culture. Iāve seen this firsthand in corporate environments, academia, and venture capital: the more senior the individual, the more ingrained their workflows and thought patterns, and the harder it is for them to adapt.
Naturally, all eyes are on the fresh, unbiased, and tech-savvy juniors to explore new tools, test and evaluate them, bring them up for budget decisions and eventually explain to and teach the seniors how to use them.
Point in case: Who introduced Calendly, SuperHuman, Zapier, and your new CRM system in your organization? ChatGPT? Notion? Slack? The new data source? The list goes on but the answer remains the same: the more junior team members.
But what happens when cutting-edge technologies like GenAI demand rapid adoption and integration across the board? Is it sufficient to rely on the juniors to drive this massive change process?
Asking myself this question a lot, and working hard to change workflows across our organization for years, I recently came across a fascinating paper āDonāt Expect Juniors to Teach Senior Professionals to Use Generative AIā by leading researchers from MIT, Harvard, Wharton, and Warwich that explores this adoption gap through a fascinating study of junior consultants at Boston Consulting Group.
It turns out that while younger professionals might seem like natural ambassadors for new technologies, they often fall short when it comes to helping their senior counterparts integrate modern tools and technologies effectively.
The unique findings of this paper are so incredibly valuable that I decided to dedicate this episode to a deep dive and complement it with my own learnings on how to drive tech adoption in a venture capital firm. Learnings are universally applicable and can help you solve tech & tool adoption across any organization.
