67. Phillips Head

A demonstrably better idea is, surprisingly, not immediately accepted.

Imagine being the American inventor Henry F. Phillips, who in the early 1930s dreamed up the now ubiquitous Phillips head screw and screwdriver. His invention was demonstrably better than the clunky slotted screw convention that had preceded it. As you may be reminded when you still occasionally encounter the old slotted variety, the driver keeps slipping out of the slotted screw, causing you to interrupt your work to mutter colorful imprecations. The Phillips head screwdriver, on the other hand, is self-centering and stays in.

The new invention was hands down better, but infuriatingly, people kept on using slotted screws. Phillips must have been distraught. His better invention was simply ignored. It was eventually going to be accepted, but he didn’t know that. From today’s perspective, you’d like to be able to get an encouraging word back to him in 1930:

“Hang in there, Henry,” you’d tell him. “History is going to rule in your favor. There will come a day when it will be simply unthinkable for a new product to come out with slotted-head screws. The Phillips head will rule.”

“Yes, but when? When?”

“Well, it may take a few years, but then—”

“Years!!! You mean it may be 1935 or 1940 before people switch over to my invention?”

“Actually, we were thinking more along the lines of 1985 or 1990.”

“Mrghhhh.”

Newer and better is not enough to assure immediate acceptance. It takes time. Organizations resist change and/or defer change during an extended period of decision-making. But it can be frustrating to those who invent and espouse better ideas to see their proposals ignored, or worse still, considered to death. In the military, considering something to death is called the “slow roll.” During our years of project work, we’ve seen that almost every good new idea that has come along has been slow-rolled, at least for a while. Even in a supposed fast-developing industry like software, for example, some of today’s accepted best practices took as much as twenty years to become accepted.¹

¹ For an explanation of the 20-year lag, see Samuel T. Redwine, Jr., and William E. Riddle, “Software Technology Maturation,” Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Software Engineering (New York: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1985), pp. 189-200.

If you’re presently frustrated that a demonstrably better way that you’ve been advocating has not been embraced, then please take heart from this: The great inventors of our past—people like Thomas Alva Edison and Werner von Siemens—are not remembered for a single invention. Rather it was their ability to come up with new ideas again and again that distinguished them. Someone who is pushing one idea is a promoter, while someone who’s got a history of coming up with multiple good ideas is an innovator. The transition from promoter to innovator takes years and decades, but it’s honest and involving work and it comes with a surprising extra benefit: People are a lot more inclined to accept the ideas offered by a proven innovator.