Try to teach someone who doesn’t work with computers how much a computer might make their job easier. The most common reaction you find is stark reluctance. Why would anyone be against learning something that might make their job easier? Often it is because they fear that something that makes their job easier might one day take over their job.
Teaching is like asking someone to go on a trip. Just as no one is going to take you up on an invitation to travel on a trip from which they would never return, people will be reluctant to participate in learning about their own obsolescence.
When you try to teach anyone something new, you have to make it clear from the outset that the destination is someplace we’d all like to go.
“What do I need that for?” Jack protested when his granddaughter asked why he didn’t use a computer. Jack had been a farmer all his life and had gotten along fine for fifty years without a computer.
His granddaughter gave him twenty examples of things he could do with a computer, such as keep track of his expenses or plan his growing schedule, and each time Jack replied that he been doing those things without a computer.
“What about the weather? What about reports you could get in an instant?”
Finally Jack relented, and a seventy-year-old farmer who had never so much as set his vcr was using a computer to track every aspect of his farm. Jack admitted old habits die hard. “I get stubborn, like anybody else. I don’t need every newfangled thing to do this job, but every now and then a piece of equipment does help.”
Feelings of self-threat are the single biggest obstacle in gaining the willing participation of workers in new training programs. Moreover, feelings of self-threat tend to spread among co-workers as they share their concerns.
Wiesenfeld, Raghuram, and Raghu 1999