Have you ever had the experience of learning a new and better way to do something, gotten excited about applying it to your own work, eagerly showed a new-and-improved version to an audience, only for them to claim that “the old way is better”?

It’s a frustrating, disheartening, and often baffling response. I’ve heard it plenty myself, in my time creating presentations, graphics, and dashboards for internal and external customers. Even when I knew I was improving on the status quo (at least, based on the dataviz and presentation books and blogs I was reading), I’d still run into this kind of pushback.

It took me many years to understand this: when an audience insists that the old way is better, they’re not wrong. At least, not entirely wrong: from a certain perspective, in that moment of comparing an existing product or process with something new, the old way will always have a significant, specific advantage, which we’ll talk more about in a moment.

Fortunately for me, and for all of us who want to drive positive change in our organizations, the specific elements of the old ways that are “better” are impermanent. It is possible to overcome this challenge, and we’ll be sharing several specific techniques that are effective at getting our audiences to be more accepting of our new and improved offerings.

First, though, it’s important to understand where our audience is coming from when they say that they prefer their old ways of doing things. Let’s take an example from my own experience: I was trying to swap out an existing presentation deck for a monthly report—which was always filled with the same text-dense slides and unfocused charts—for a new, cleaner version that changed based on the specific insights worth highlighting that month.

My big reveal of the revised slide deck to the customer did not go as well as I had hoped. Not only did I hear “the old way is better,” I also got the dreaded “your version is harder to understand,” which was objectively not the case...or so I thought.

I was correct in one sense. In a vacuum, their old, text-dense slides were not better at communicating insights, critical information, or actionable takeaways than the new versions.

We don’t work in a vacuum, though: we work in the real world, where real people have put real time and effort into building, learning, and using their existing methods and patterns of work. Our familiarity with these structures makes us comfortable, relaxed, and reluctant to change. Familiarity is such a positive trait, in fact, that we often confuse “familiar” with “good.” Familiar things just feel better than unfamiliar things. We stick with old routines long past the time better options become available, solely because we get comfortable with them.

Often, this is what your audience means when they say “the old way is better” or “the old way is easier to understand.” They mean not exactly that old is better, but simply that it is familiar, so it feels easy. That monthly report I tried to remake may have been hard for my customers to understand at one point in time, but they had put in enough hours (or months) looking at it that they understood where to find what they were searching for, and each person had come to know when to expect that specific point in the meeting when the 10% of the slides that they needed to pay attention to would come up.

Another way to say this is that old, familiar things don’t place nearly as much of a cognitive burden on us as new things do. Cognitive burden is the effort that our brains are making as they try to make sense of what we are taking in. Every new thing that we see, hear, or touch taxes our mental capacity, as we try to understand:

what it is;
how it works;
how it relates to our needs and desires; and
whether it’s worth the effort to make sense of it.

At the same time, every familiar thing we encounter carries little to no cognitive burden...even if a person seeing that thing for the first time would find it difficult to understand.

Each communication we put in front of an audience has an implicit promise: the benefit you will gain from the insights we provide will outweigh the cost of the effort required to understand them. The ideal communication would provide great insight with very little cognitive burden (e.g., the “flatten the curve” chart); the worst would be very difficult to read and provide little to no insight.

In the real world, a communication’s position on this cost/benefit chart varies over time. A complex monthly report moves closer and closer to the origin on the “effort” axis because we get more familiar with it. The maximum benefit, in terms of insight, isn’t very high, but the cognitive burden (for long-time employees, at least) is low.

If we come in with a complete revision of this slide deck, the insight ceiling might get a lot higher...but the effort will go up as well, because the audience no longer has familiarity with it. Comparing the old to the new, an audience could find that the cost/benefit comparison favors the old version; or, at least, that’s how they could perceive it at the moment the new version is introduced.

Over time, that disparity would go away, of course, but the key is figuring out how to overcome familiarity’s unfair advantage, so that your higher-benefitting communications get a chance to become familiar as well.

Never fear! We aren’t here to be doom and gloom; we’re here to help you make the improvements you aim for at your organization. Cole talked about several effective strategies for influencing change among colleagues, stakeholders, and leadership in a recent podcast. Elizabeth gives you the opportunity to practice in the SWD community exercise reduce complexity (premium subscribers can watch her bring it to life in the learning video overcoming resistance.) Here now are a few specifically geared towards overcoming “the old way is better.”

Start from a level playing field.

Rather than starting your campaign to improve communications in your organization by redesigning a long-standing, familiar product, look for an opportunity to implement your preferred approach on a new product instead. If there’s no old version to compare your communication to, then there’s no “familiarity hurdle” to overcome.

Augment first; replace (or de-emphasize) later.

Q: What’s the best way to make a person want something desperately?

A: Take it away from them.

You may be dying to get rid of the old dense data tables and dual-axis graphs and box-and-whisker plots that litter your company’s reports and replace them with clean, insight-focused visuals...but resist that urge. There’s a high risk that this approach backfires, and only encourages your audience to hold on to those older, familiar visuals even more tightly.

Keep the old versions for now, but augment them (rather than replace them) with your preferred vision for those communications. Give your audience time to get familiar with your new creations, while they can keep their old ones as well. Eventually, the obvious benefits of your uncluttered and insight-focused slides will render the old versions obsolete.

If you’re redesigning existing products, aim to add more value than you think is necessary.

The benefits of your approach to communication are clear…to you. They may not be as patently obvious to those around you, or to your audiences. To them, it will be a big ask to give up a familiar communication in favor of something that will demand cognitive effort (at least at the beginning).

It will only be worth it, to them, if the benefits of the new product are dramatic. Whether that added value comes in the form of significantly more or deeper insights, faster communications, saving them effort elsewhere in their workflow, or some other place is dependent on your particular circumstance. Whatever it is, it must be so significant that your audience is willing to invest the effort to become familiar with it.

Small wins are better than big losses.

We wouldn’t suggest big changes for the first time in a high-value communication. You may find it easier to start small, with a few changes here and there, focusing on communications with people who know and trust you, or who seem like they’d be receptive to these changes, or who might be good advocates and champions for your vision. This also gives you time to practice, and to refine your process and techniques, so that when that high-value opportunity does come, you’re confident, prepared, informed, and supported.

Did I eventually get to the point where I no longer heard “the old way is better”? Well…not exactly. But I did learn when and how to be more bold in my communication styles, and when to merely augment less-optimal material with additional content.

More importantly, I learned that while you can’t make something immediately familiar, you can make something immediately valuable; and valuable things tend to become popular, and popular things eventually become...familiar.

If you have any success stories about getting past “the old way is better,” share them with us in our ongoing conversation.