Directors of Workforce Development, Regional Operations Managers, and VPs of Safety & Training
Our energy and utilities team went back to the old process. What do we do now?
Do not relaunch. A second launch of the same system reads as noise and spends credibility you will need. Find out whether the old path is still open, whether the new way is genuinely slower for the individual, and whether anyone noticed when people stopped. Fix whichever is true, then reintroduce quietly to one energy and utilities team rather than the whole region.
What this looks like in energy & utilities
Field crews receive new mobile asset-inspection tooling. Adoption is strong where the crew lead uses it in front of the team and near zero where the crew lead does not, and nobody tracked crew lead behavior as the variable.
In field operations the crew lead is the entire adoption mechanism. Train the crews and skip the leads and the rollout is decided by whichever leads happened to be curious.
How you know it is happening
The system is technically live and functionally abandoned.
Nobody was ever asked why they stopped, so the reason is still unknown.
Leadership is discussing a relaunch with a bigger announcement than the first one.
Why the obvious fixes do not hold
Relaunching. It tells everyone the first announcement did not mean anything, which is exactly the belief you need to reverse.
Escalating enforcement. Enforcement without closing the old path produces resentment and workarounds rather than adoption.
Blaming the vendor. Sometimes fair, almost never useful, and it guarantees the same outcome with the next vendor.
What actually works
Diagnose first: is the old path open, is the new way slower per person, did anyone notice when people stopped.
Reintroduce to one team, closing the old path for them specifically, with a week-three check.
Let that team's numbers do the arguing. One visible success persuades better than any mandate.
What to measure
Before reintroducing, time both paths honestly with a real user rather than a champion. If the new way is slower per person, nothing else you do will matter.
In energy and utilities organizations the systems this usually touches are mobile inspection apps, AI predictive maintenance, outage management, safety reporting.
The part nobody names
The mechanism underneath all of this has a name. Dr. Noah St. John calls it taming the caveman in your brain, and it is not a metaphor for laziness. A 200,000-year-old survival instinct is making decisions about 2026 software. It treats an unfamiliar system as a threat, it prefers the known path, and it fires before anyone consciously chooses anything.
That is why the fix is behavioral rather than technical, and why it holds once installed. It is also why energy and utilities organizations keep buying capability and capturing none of it: the instinct that decides adoption was never addressed by the rollout plan.
Dr. Noah has spent 29 years on this specific gap, with $3 billion in documented client results across 150+ countries and 27 books in print.
Common questions
Should we relaunch a failed rollout?
Not in the same form. Diagnose why it reverted, fix that specific cause, then reintroduce quietly to one team.
How do you get a team to stop using the old spreadsheet?
Close it. If the legacy path still works it will keep winning, because it is faster for the individual even when it costs the organization more.
Want your team’s number instead of a general answer?
Twelve questions, about three minutes. It scores your team on the four places execution actually leaks and gives you a dollar figure for what the friction costs you a year.