Airbus A380 Superjumbo — the largest passenger airliner in the world, with one mind-boggling “flaw.” Apparently, the Superjumbo is so quiet that the pilots have complained about the lack of engine noise, which is preventing them from sleeping during rest breaks.
As part of a business process reengineering initiative, our team recently updated a key financial module. The goal was simple — to make the process faster. The operation used to take upto 20 minutes to process a batch of transactions. Now, it takes less than 45 seconds. We accomplished our goal. The update was ready to be rolled-out for the business users. What happened next took us all by surprise. The end-users found the updated program to be “unacceptable due to major differences between the old and the new process.” Even though the solution was 30 times faster that before, was it unacceptable because the users were not quite ready to cope with change? Partly, it’s due to an emblematic resistance against change — found quite too often in large businesses.
I wasn’t surprised to read words of antipathy against Windows 7, Microsoft’s unreleased next-generation Operating System. From what I’ve been following for the past few months, Windows 7 is a radical platform, finally towards the right direction. It’s not Linux, but it’s radical. It runs faster than it’s predecessors. It’s solid, and offers much better compatiblity. Yet, due to it’s slightly reformed (and more streamlined) user interface, what most resentful users utter in aversion are actually improvements.
Improvements can be opaque, and change can be misleading I suppose, which is a behavioral complexity than anything else.