The new routing system was, by every technical measure, better than what it replaced — faster optimization, fewer manual overrides needed, real efficiency gains in the pilot. Six months after full rollout, dispatchers had quietly built a parallel process in a shared spreadsheet and were only using the new system to generate the paperwork nobody upstream ever actually checked. The software hadn't failed technically. It had failed to earn the trust of the people it was supposed to replace their judgment with, and so they'd routed around it — a workaround for a workaround, ironically, in a routing system.
Leadership research on organizational change keeps landing on a version of the same finding: technology rollouts and process transformations fail overwhelmingly for reasons that have nothing to do with the technology. McKinsey's own published work on organizational transformation puts the failure rate for large change efforts at around 70% — and the recurring cause isn't that the new tool doesn't work. It's that the people expected to use it were never actually brought along, so the moment leadership stopped watching closely, the old habits quietly returned.
What "bringing people along" actually requires
It's not a communications problem, solvable with a better rollout email. It's a trust problem. If your team has watched two previous "transformative" systems get introduced with fanfare and quietly abandoned within a year, their skepticism about system number three isn't resistance to change — it's an accurate read on your organization's track record. And if the dispatchers weren't asked what was actually wrong with the old process before the new one was designed, the new system is solving a problem leadership assumed existed, not necessarily the one that did.
A tool doesn't change behavior. A tool that people trust, that solves a problem they actually recognize, used by leaders willing to enforce the new way even when the old way is faster in the short term — that changes behavior. Skip any one of those three, and you've bought expensive software that generates compliance paperwork.
What we should have done differently
- Ask what's actually broken before prescribing the fix. The dispatchers had real complaints about the old process. Almost none of them were the complaints the new system was built to solve.
- Put a visible early adopter on the floor, not just in the announcement. A respected dispatcher using the new system successfully changes more minds than any leadership memo.
- Enforce the switch even when the workaround is faster today. Every time a manager quietly lets the old spreadsheet slide because a deadline's tight, the message received is that the new system is optional under pressure — which, in this line of work, is always.
We eventually got the routing system adopted for real — not by improving the software, which was already good, but by pulling three senior dispatchers into redesigning how it rolled out, and by shutting off access to the old shared spreadsheet on a fixed date instead of letting the transition drift. The technology had been ready for months. The trust took longer.
Sources:
- McKinsey & Company, perspectives on organizational transformation.