The revolutionaries’ problem
I discovered recently one of the biggest problems all revolutionaries face - the lack of understanding of their brilliance.
This is a very simple thing in one way - others simply “don’t get it”, being used to doing things the “old way”.
The “old way” usually means a way they know every aspect of, like, know what to expect from it and more importantly - feel comfortable with.
I can imagine nay-sayers deprecating every major breakthrough we had, starting with the telephone (”you have to lay wires to every town, state and country - a monstrous job!”), or a train (”the vacuum from outside the carriage will suffocate the passengers”) to more modern ones - like the internet (”it’s only for watching porn and downloading device drivers, what else do you need it for?”).
But as always, the adoption curve comes kicks in and more and more people start using such a service/idea/methodology.
What seems to be needed for advocating “new ways” is to cross the chasm, but it still happens on a “user by user” basis, very rarely it comes as a sudden revolution (revolutions like AJAX/web2.0 being the good exceptions of that rule).
But if you don’t have the huge marketing machine (buzz generator) behind you, how do you get your point across?
The best thing to do, at least in IT-related fields seems to be creating a comprehensive comparison of the “old” and “new” ways, in a strongly graphical way, accompanies by easy-to-grasp charts, code snippets, and most importantly - pros and cons of each solution.
Don’t think your revolutionary idea is “needed” by anyone - they got without it until Today, so they can live perfectly well without it - so try to communicate the “real, hard advantages” instead of “paradigm-shifting, first-mover advantage generating solution”.
But sometimes it doesn’t help, the technology has to wait until its time comes, until people start to realize that they HAVE a problem and they want to do something about it and seek solutions to it.
This is where it seems easiest to help them by offering your “new approach”.
But by the time it comes - is it still a “revolution”, or merely an “evolution”? This is argueable.
But the rule seems to be - try to help people which are looking for and open to New Ways (in other words - acknowledge that they have a PROBLEM), you’ll get a very big barrier out of the way.
Don’t be a solution waiting for the right problem.