The challenge of “a risky scheme”

New ideas aren’t adopted all at once. A few people go first while the rest of us watch to see how it goes. “Look, Mikey, he likes it!” This is the story of tech innovations, dance crazes and even food.

Ideas spread horizontally, and people who prefer the status quo will embrace an idea only when they feel as though they don’t have much of a choice. It took the telephone more than forty years to reach a million people. Today, this spread is much faster, but it’s never instantaneous.

It’s gradual, organic, and based on the decisions of individuals, rolling up into a larger change.

Ideas that require simultaneous adoption by large populations are a notable exception to the horizontal rule. Nuclear power plants, for example, aren’t the sort of thing you try in your backyard and then spread the word to the others. The same goes for laws and policies, as well as institutional shifts that come from a committee with authority.

Often, people who are innovators spend time and energy to highlight the productivity, equity or magic of their new approach. In a point by point presentation, these arguments may often carry the day. This is the occasional thoughtful work of a committee that’s actually focused on making a change happen.

But two words can cause the demand for wholesale shifts to stumble. Not all innovations are positive, generative or wise. They need pushback.

When someone who worries about a change identifies a “risky scheme,” red flags start flying.

“Risky” means it might not work. Change is always risky, because innovation doesn’t come with a guarantee. An organization or culture that fears the risk may decide to wait a few cycles, to see what happens if they don’t switch. “We can always do it later.”

And “scheme” implies that someone pushing this change has a different agenda than we do. The instigator of the change obviously sees a benefit in selling us the new idea, or else they wouldn’t put in the effort. When we don’t trust the originator of the idea, when we see that they may profit more than we do, it shifts from being an innovation to becoming a scheme. No one likes to get hustled, no one wants to be tricked.

The huckster or con artist fears being called out for the risky scheme.

The opportunity is to get better at identifying the risky schemes, particularly when they seem easy, convenient or short-term greedy. We can name them and push back on the pressure to go along because being manipulated is not in our interests.

August 6, 2024