Eroding our Instinct to Avoid Change

Welcome to the 25th edition of The LogTech Letter, a weekly look at the impact technology is having on the world of global and domestic logistics. The week before last, I looked at whether the logistics software industry had already zoomed past multi-tenancy. This week, I’ll examine the intractability of human nature as it relates to logistics software.

As a reminder, this is the place to turn on Fridays for quick reflection on a dynamic, software category, or specific company that’s on my mind. You’ll also find a collection of links to stories, videos and podcasts from me, my colleagues at the Journal of Commerce, and other analysis I find interesting.

For those that don’t know me, I’m Eric Johnson, senior technology editor at the Journal of Commerce and JOC.com. I can be reached at eric.johnson@ihsmarkit.com or on Twitter at @LogTechEric.

Note: Apologies for missing my Friday newsletter. I’m in the thick of TPM21 planning, prepping and recording, and the week just got away from me. I’ll try not to let it happen again. But as a bonus, I’m giving you a special Monday edition in exchange. Don’t get used to it though.

I think I could probably stop charging you all $5,000 per month to subscribe to this Substack if I had a dollar for every time I hear some permutation of this sentiment: “It’s not the technology that’s holding back adoption of our product. It’s that people having a hard time changing.”

This will not be an HBR-style opus on dealing with change management. Instead, this will be a dose of sobering reality. You can’t get people to change their habits when they aren’t highly incentivized to do so. And there’s hardly anything that’s less of an incentive than asking them to change the system they use the most at work to a more efficient one.

I’ve heard of several ways of addressing this challenge. One 3PL executive, speaking at a CIO conference a few years back, said that people’s annual bonus was partially tied to how much they used a new TMS the 3PL had purchased. Hang on to the old system = sacrifice some of your bonus. Another CTO at a 3PL once told me that it needed to slowly, function by function, pull away a system under the guise of maintenance, and replace them with the upgraded functions available in a new system in which it had invested. The old system never returned.

More recently, the team at Gnosis Freight explained to me that they took an aesthetic and workflow design approach that doesn’t differ too much from Excel. The goal is to get people using the system, not fearing what lies behind Door No. 2. Then, once they’re entering data in a structured way that resembles the spreadsheets they’re accustomed to using, the gradual, almost imperceptible evolution to a more modern design and workflow can occur.

The opposite example, a forwarder CTO told me last week, is when a company invests in a backbone system and the users hack and re-engineer their collective way around it, until it’s a more expensive version of the process it was supposed to replace. This is the intractable human spirit in full flight. This is calculating each cell in a spreadsheet instead of using a macro, or looking for every instance of a misspelled word instead of using the search word function. This is believing that you know how to avoid traffic better than Google Maps and Waze.

So how do we get around this? In logistics, I’m not sure there is a way beyond good ol’ reps. Logistics is not an industry of rocket science - you learn all the intricacies of it through time, experience and repetitions, like the Colorado River slowly carving out the Grand Canyon. But logistics is an industry of data science, possessing a volume of data too large for humans to process on their own. So to get to the point where we let systems help us process those volumes of data, limitless scenarios, and complex optimizations, we need it drilled through our thick skulls that we need to do things differently. It doesn’t happen that we get a new system on Monday and on Tuesday we’re ready to go. It takes time and repetition.

There will be a point at which humans’ instinctive reflex to avoid change will not be such a huge impediment, but it will take time and repetition, to know that the macro solves our problem quicker, that Waze is right and we are less so, that the Colorado kept eroding its way through rock whether the rock wanted it to or not.

Here’s a roundup of pieces on JOC.com the past two weeks from my colleagues and myself (note: there is a paywall):

• Cargo Stream’s release of a new app to connect shippers, forwarders and drayage carriers in Europe could hardly be more timely. Container shortages are such a big story that even the mainstream media has taken notice in recent weeks. (Though “shippers” are not the shipping lines, but either the exporters or consignees. 🤷‍♂️)

• I continue to be amazed by all the cool tech available to small truckload carriers. Add Axele, which spun off Optym in mid-2020, to the list. Optym has a history of building optimization software across a range of transportation industries, including for airlines, rail, and trucking. 

• I spoke to Jason Traff of Shipwell about his company’s growth in 2020, the tricky balance of defining new technology categories, and what shippers actually care about when they seek out a tech-enabled service provider.

And here are some recent discussions, reports, and analysis I found interesting:

• Nick Chubb’s opinion pieces are generally worth your time, and especially so here as he dives in to how 2020 was an accelerant for maritime-related decarbonization technology.

• Speaking of decarbonization, this IKEA manifesto is worth considering. More and more shippers are defining what they will do and how they will do it. Supply chain will be a part of that. 

• Want to get smart about SPACs? You could do worse than turn to this analysis by colleagues at IHS Markit. 

• Speaking of container shortages, Bjorn Vang Jensen, now of Sea-Intelligence, gives his thoughts here.

• What does the GameStop/Robinhood affair tell us about logistics technology? Nothing, it’s a crazy thing that’s happened and people in shipping have work to do.

• Plug time: I’m moderating a session with Henning Schleyerbach, COO of Digital Container Shipping Association (DCSA), Pascal Ollivier, chair of the IAPH Data Collaboration Committee, and Julian Abril Garcia, of the IMO, on the future of ship-to-shore data sharing at ports..

• Weekly moving update: still not moving to Florida or Texas.

• Weekly Keith Rabois update: sharing only the best content from the best publications.

  

🚨 TPM21 registration is live, and so is the agenda. We’ll have two days of #LogTech focused programming Feb 25-26, ahead of the main program, which kicks off March 1. Each week until TPM, I’ll be highlighting a tech-focused session we’ll be hosting. 

AWS is a ubiquitous presence in modern commerce. As cloud computing has truly taken hold, AWS (and its big-name competitors) are migrating entire industries to new, scalable, data-driven infrastructure. Why does this matter to our industry? Well, Michele Sancricca and Adam Roark will attempt to explain why during a March 3 session at TPM21. Both have roots in logistics - this one will be one to mark your calendars for.

Disclaimer: This newsletter is in no way affiliated with The Journal of Commerce or IHS Markit, and any opinions are mine only.