The People Who Resist Technology Might Be the Ones We Need Most

I still remember one of my first conversations with a construction superintendent.

I was a young marketing coordinator at Bovis Lend Lease, now Lendlease, and I needed to write a project profile about Signature Place, a high-rise project we were building in St. Petersburg, Florida.

I called the superintendent, Ricky Holland, and asked if he had a digital version of the project rendering he could send me.

His response was something along the lines of:

"First of all, dear, call me Captain Rick. Second of all, Captain Rick doesn't do digital."

I still laugh when I think about it.

And Captain Rick really didn't do digital.

But over the next couple of years, I learned an enormous amount from him.

Standing on a Job Site and Asking Questions

Sometimes my job took me out to the construction site to take progress photos or gather information for marketing. When I was there, I would inevitably end up standing next to Captain Rick while he explained what was happening on the project.

I asked a lot of questions.

Why are they doing that?

What happens next?

Why does this have to happen before that?

How does this affect the schedule?

He would explain something, I would listen, and then I would ask another question.

What struck me was the amount of information that seemed to exist in his head.

He understood how to build incredibly complex buildings. He could think through the schedule from different perspectives and understand how one decision affected something else months down the road. He could practically assemble the building in his head.

Was he the most technologically advanced person on the project?

Definitely not.

People helped him with some of that. Someone might help with an email or handle something digitally for him.

But nobody was questioning whether Captain Rick knew how to build a building.

He had decades of knowledge that you couldn't replace with software.

I've been thinking about him lately because of AI.

What Happens to All That Knowledge?

We're spending a lot of time talking about getting people to adopt AI right now.

Who is using it?

Who isn't?

Which departments are behind?

Who needs training?

Which tools should we buy?

Those are reasonable questions. But I wonder if we're missing another one.

What happens to the knowledge of the people who don't adopt it quickly?

There are probably people inside our organizations right now who know an incredible amount about our customers, projects, products, processes or industries, but who aren't going to be the first people experimenting with an AI tool.

Some of them might actively resist it.

That doesn't make their knowledge less valuable.

In fact, they may have exactly the knowledge we need to make these systems useful.

I've seen another version of this before.

The Estimator Who Hated the CRM

A few years later, I was working on CRM implementations at Unanet.

I was helping a general contractor implement its CRM, and one of the people I worked with was an estimator.

He hated the system.

I don't mean he was mildly skeptical about it. He hated pretty much everything we were asking him to do.

He didn't want to enter the data. He didn't like setting up pipeline stages. He didn't see why any of this was necessary.

And every week, I had an hour-long call with him.

We worked through it.

Then one week, something was different.

He wasn't as grumpy.

He had been in a meeting and was able to pull information from the CRM and show his team all of the opportunities they had in the pipeline.

Then he could show them something else.

If they won even half of those projects, they were going to need more people.

For the first time, he had data to back up something he already knew from experience.

Instead of telling management, "I think we're going to need to hire," he could actually show them why.

Suddenly, the CRM wasn't a database somebody was forcing him to update.

It helped him make his case.

Everything changed after that.

The guy who had probably been one of the most resistant people during the implementation became one of the platform's biggest advocates.

If I remember correctly, that account eventually expanded by something like 300 percent, and he played a significant role in that because he believed in what the system could do.

I think about him when organizations talk about technology adoption.

Resistance Doesn't Always Mean Rejection

Sometimes we look at someone who isn't adopting a new technology and assume they're unwilling to change.

Maybe.

But sometimes they just haven't seen how it helps them yet.

The estimator didn't suddenly become a different person. We didn't convince him that entering data was fun.

He finally saw the connection between the work we were asking him to do and a problem he actually cared about.

That's a very different thing.

And I think there's something in that for those of us working with AI now.

The people who immediately jump into AI aren't necessarily the people with the most valuable knowledge to put into it.

Your Captain Rick might be sitting somewhere in your organization right now.

It could be a superintendent who has spent 30 years building projects. It could be an estimator who can look at a set of drawings and notice something everyone else missed. It could be a salesperson who knows the history of every major account. It could be someone in Customer Success who understands exactly why certain customers stay and others leave.

They might not be writing prompts.

They might not care about the newest AI platform.

They may even roll their eyes when you bring it up.

I wouldn't write them off.

Be Patient With Change

Technology in construction has changed dramatically since I stood on those job sites with Captain Rick. I've watched the industry move through new project management systems, CRMs, mobile technology, drones, reality capture, BIM and now AI.

Some people jump into new technology immediately. Other people need to understand why it matters first.

I've learned not to confuse the speed at which someone adopts technology with the value of what they know.

Sometimes our job is to be patient enough to connect the two.

Because somewhere in your organization there is probably a Captain Rick.

And I would still like to hear what he has to say.