Rival departments are encouraged to be first to adopt a risky new system, with status perks and loaned help, so they absorb its early failures while the proposer's own unit waits.
An example
Buying a new mobile work-order system, a regional power distributor let the head of grid operations, whose own crews would eventually use it, champion it as "the showcase for our digital future." He proposed that the metering field-service unit go first. The offer came with a seat at the chief executive's monthly innovation review, two loaned analysts, and the vendor's promise of free configuration. When the field-service director asked for three more months of pilot data, he said in front of the executive team that he hoped metering wasn't going to be the laggard again. She agreed to go first. The system's offline mode failed in rural areas, and for five months her crews logged jobs on paper and re-entered them at night. Grid operations adopted the system a year later, after the vendor had fixed the problem using her unit's data.
Why it works
Loading the first-mover slot with status (an innovation title, time with the sponsoring executive, credit in the write-up) makes volunteering look like a career step. Loaned people, vendor concessions, and fast budget approval remove the logistical reasons to decline, while the deep technical risk stays where it was. Waiting is recast as timidity, and holding back seems to hand the visibility to another unit. The status reward arrives at decision time and the technical risk at delivery time. The ground for it is a technology with a credible strategic story, a rival who is status-hungry or insecure, sponsors who reward visible bets, and failure modes that are technical and slow to appear.
The thinking behind it
George A. Akerlof Akerlof's The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism (1970) shows how a party that knows the quality of what it offers holds power over one that cannot check. The proposer of an early-adopter slot knows the system is unproven, and the unit invited to go first may not. Bringing in your own technical people, and asking for references from comparable early users, closes that information gap before you volunteer.
A. Michael Spence Spence's Job Market Signaling (1973) explains why costly, visible actions are believed. Going first with a risky system is that kind of signal, of ambition and of loyalty to the sponsor, which is why a status-hungry unit volunteers. It also explains the trap: the signal is sent at decision time and paid for at delivery time. Sponsors who reward rigorous pilots change what the signal is worth.
Amos Tversky In The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice (1981), Tversky and Kahneman show that equivalent choices are judged differently depending on how they are described. Waiting for pilot data described as prudence and the same wait described as being the laggard again lead to different decisions. Saying plainly that asking for data is ordinary prudence restores the first description.
Warning signs
Talk of innovation leadership comes from a proposer who champions the pilot and keeps their own unit out of its first phase. The offer comes with perks: executive exposure, loaned people, vendor concessions, quick budget. Requests for more pilot data are called foot-dragging, sometimes in front of senior leaders. The risks that would decide the pilot are technical and would show only months in.
How to defend yourself
Separate the status from the risk before you volunteer.
- Bring in your own technical people, or an outside expert, to read the system's risk before you commit, and ask the vendor for references from comparable early users.
- Ask, in the meeting, why the proposer's unit is not going first.
- If you go first, set terms in writing: success criteria, a pilot scope you can roll back, support that stays if things go wrong, and what happens to your targets during the pilot.
- Ask units that took earlier first-mover offers what happened to them.
Asking for pilot data is ordinary prudence, and saying so plainly takes the sting out of the laggard label.
How a leader shuts it down
Reward rigorous pilots, including ones that end in a no, and stop rewarding heroic adoption for its own sake. Ask the champion of a new system which of their own units will use it first. Protect early adopters' targets during pilots, so the units that test new things are not the ones left carrying the cost.