In this short dialogue, the speakers critique the common advice to "start small" when introducing new technology or processes in a company. They argue that isolated pilots lead to fragmented implementations, fail to change employee behavior, and rarely move business metrics because they remain limited in scope. Instead, they advocate beginning with a clear, organization‑level goal, working backwards to identify supporting initiatives, and then executing bite‑sized projects that fit within that overarching strategy. By involving management early and aligning projects with strategic objectives, companies can ensure that technology adoption translates into real business impact rather than just a technical proof‑of‑concept.
Chapters
I think that one of the worst pieces of advice that's given out, and it's probably the most frequent pieces of advice given out, is to just start small. Mm-hmm. What ends up happening is, you know, you have different groups in the company that are all told to just start small. They're all thinking, okay, I'm gonna go do, you know, test monitoring stuff on this machine. Meanwhile, these guys over here are looking at a full-blown system to do some machine monitoring. These guys are just going to put in a sensor and you have everybody doing things every different way in your company. And, you know, the other thing is if you start small and you say, okay, I'm just going to do this on this one machine, nobody's going to change the way that they do their job based on there's now data available on that one machine. And what we talked about earlier is you don't get the value From just having the technology installed. You have to change the way that you behave on the shop floor and so forth. And so if you're not changing behaviors because you've only implemented it on this thing, all you've done is a technology, you know, pilot. You've not really seen if it makes a difference for your business. And so for a variety of reasons, I think that you need to start with that larger picture in mind, figure out what it is that you're really trying to accomplish, work backwards from there. Into what are the things that will support that. And then strategically, you can start, you know, on bite-sized chunks within that overall strategy to make a difference.
And that's a very typical thing that an engineer or somebody with some limited buying power might say, I'm just going to get this little thing here and prove to management how this works. But it can backfire because management can see, oh, look, we did these 2 or 3 little projects this year, and we didn't move the needle on the business. Right. Instead, if you turn it around and look at strategic, well, where my goal is to move the needle for management, and then say, okay, how do we support that? We've really brought management into, into the whole equation and decision-making earlier in the process.
