The Mirage Of The Innovators and Early Adopters

In every training class there are at least a few people who just LOVE what we are teaching and jump to implement what they learn. And, oh how we love these people! These are the students trainers live for and keep us motivated from day to day. They are a joy and they make our training lives rewarding and satisfying.

Unfortunately they are a bit of a mirage. The mistake we make is that we use these few people as justification for the worth of the entire training/learning effort. These anecdotal "success stories" become the metric for success. Instead of looking at the return on investment from the whole class, we often focus just on the few success stories and conclude the whole effort was successful.

Let me explain why this is shortsighted. There is a rich body of research that explains why we are always likely to find these ambitious few employees who will transfer what they learn. It is called the diffusion of innovation research. It turns out that it doesn't matter whether we are teaching uneducated farmers to plow rows in their fields differently or college-educated professionals how to service their customers better the rate of adoption follows a remarkably similar pattern. Typically, 2.5% of the people, called innovators, will jump immediately to try something new just because they love new things. Another 13.5% of the people, called early adopters, can be persuaded to try new things with only reasonable effort such as we might do in a training class. The remainder of the people will be much slower to adopt new things.

Now if you do the math that means that we can fairly easily expect to convince 15% of our trainees to use the new methods we are teaching. Remember what our estimate is of typical rates of learning transfer--10-30%--Exactly in the range that is predicted by the diffusion research!! And 2.5% of the people will do anything new just because they like change!

So you see it is a mirage for us to focus just on these innovators and early adopters. Fortunately the early adopters can be influential in getting other people to adopt the new learning but at the end of the day the "fallacy of the few" means we have to look beyond the 15% who are likely to be success stories and find ways to reach the other 85% of trainees.

The solution is transfer management. The first 15% of trainees are the "low-hanging fruit" of training. To get the rest we have to put in place PROACTIVE strategies that will catalyze learning transfer.
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