What does it take to adopt new technology or a different way of doing things? I started thinking about this recently when realized that, at least in the woodworking industry, we often only adopt new methods because we have to.
One would think that as soon as someone comes up with a new idea or an innovative technology, if this new thing is really good, it would immediately catch fire and spread with enthusiastic adherents. The problem is that there is always some level of inertia that slows that process down.

Maybe the new technology is too expensive or too difficult to learn or forces us to abandon too many things we were quite comfortable to use in the past. It seems we must reach a pain point where the problems of keeping old methods are simply too painful to bear, so we are willing make the effort to pay the price to try something new.

Take the much touted and much maligned metric system. Traditional American woodworkers will tell you they love the imperial system because its fraction-based measures make it easier to divide things into equal measures. Setting up a tenon on 3/4-inch stock is a breeze — just divide it into three equal 1/4-inch parts. If that board is 19mm, the division gets more complicated, equal parts measuring 6.33mm. Halving 5/8-inch is 5/16 inch rather than dividing 15.875mm by two. (Yeah, I know, just round it to 16mm and your half is 8mm.)

But then we come up to the modern reality that too many people starting out in woodworking can’t actually read a tape measure or calculate fractions. Think of the famous business case of A&W restaurants trying to compete with McDonald’s Quarter-Pounder by offering a 1/3-pound burger. But people thought 1/4-pound was more than the 1/3-pound product. Or think of all the mistakes made in your shop by someone misreading fraction marks on a tape.

Some shops made the leap to using the metric system, not because they recognized it was inherently superior but because they gave up trying to train workers to deal with fractions. Sometimes we run AWAY from the past rather than run TOWARD the future.
Let’s face it, we rarely just embrace change because of its positive merits. It’s all too comfortable to say, “We’ve always done it this way.” But what happens when some kind of challenge or crisis develops past the point you can bear?

Salesmen are often told to sell something based on its benefits rather than its features because the customer likely won’t recognize the value of the features without understanding the benefits. Just because something is faster, doesn’t mean it’s better unless we can show the benefit of increased speed.

Early adopters of new technology are often those who have the vision to see the benefits themselves. 

For the rest of us, it might take suffering a serious pain point before we leap ahead.