Benedict Evans wrote an interesting blog post recently. It discussed why, when new regulations are passed, the tech industry’s first response is always negative. He made a wider point:

Whenever anyone proposes new rules or regulations, the people affected always have reasons why this is a terrible idea that will cause huge damage. This applies to bankers, doctors, farmers, lawyers, academics… and indeed software engineers. They always say ‘no’ and policy-makers can’t take that at face value: they discount it by some percentage, as a form of bargaining. But when people say ‘no’, they might actually mean one of three different things, and it’s important to understand the difference.

The three meanings are: that they just don’t like the change; that the change will have grave negative consequences that haven’t been understood; and that the change is misconceived and impossible to implement.

I think this is more generally applicable to the process of change, and that doctors are probably more likely to say “no” to change than other groups. Because it was a tech article, it made me think of times when tech changes had been imposed on my medical work.

I can think of two notable tech changes over my consultant career to date which I thought fell into the third category, but—when they were introduced anyway—turned out to fall into the first category.

I can also think of two which I thought fell into the third category, and where I turned out to be correct, and rollout was abandoned at the very last minute. In one case, this was even after staff members had been trained to use the new system. In the other, which was cancelled after it was supposed to have rolled out, I was vaguely threatened by someone saying “I’m not asking you to use this system, I’m instructing you to”—as though that made any difference to the fact that I could not have access to their system.

And this makes me reflect that perhaps, like so many things in life, the problem boils down to failures of communication. If the concerns I raised weren’t genuinely showstoppers, then I would have felt better about the rollout if someone had helped me to understand the flaw in my thinking. For the two which were showstoppers, perhaps a conversation along similar lines would have revealed that I wasn’t talking nonsense.

And, of course, that assumes that those performing the rollout have the time and resources available to have those conversations.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.