Software is identity
A while ago I said something and got pushback. I let it go. I’m saying it again now, and this time I’ll defend it.
Resistance to new software is rarely about the software. It’s an organisation protecting its identity.
Learning a new tool is hard, and everyone knows the resistance it creates. If the old way works, why change? But that question hides the real one. Tools aren’t separate from how we work. They are how we work. Every tool brings its own routines, and routines are where an organisation’s identity lives day to day. Economists Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter called routines the genes of a firm: what a company repeatedly does is what it is. Change the routines and you change the company.
So it runs in two directions. Culture decides which tools get adopted. Then the tools reshape the culture.
When culture vetoes the tool
In 1975, a Kodak engineer named Steven Sasson built the first digital camera prototype. Kodak didn’t ignore digital. For a while in the mid-2000s it was one of the biggest digital camera sellers in the US. What it refused to do was let digital redefine what Kodak was. The whole company ran on film: chemistry, consumables, processing labs, retail. Those margins weren’t just a revenue line. They were the identity. Digital stayed a product, never the company. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012.
Fujifilm faced the same collapse with the same technology. It made a different choice. It decided it wasn’t a film company but a materials and chemistry company, and it moved into healthcare, cosmetics and industrial films. Fujifilm is still here.
Both companies got the same shock and had access to the same tools. One protected its identity and the other rewrote it, and only the second survived.
When the tool rewrites the culture
When Avid Media Composer arrived in 1989, many editors who had built careers on cutting film by hand pushed back. Economics made adoption inevitable, since non-linear editing was faster and eventually cheaper. But culture set the pace, decided who made it through, and reshaped what craft meant. In 1997, The English Patient, cut on Avid by Walter Murch, became the first digitally edited film to win the Oscar for editing. Within a decade the edit room had reorganised around the software. The assistant editor stopped handling film and started managing media. A new role, a new workflow and a new definition of skill all came out of a tool.
Why this matters now
Digital transformation and AI transformation are usually framed as technology problems. They’re identity problems. The resistance isn’t stubbornness, and it isn’t stupidity. People defend their tools the way they defend who they are, because that’s what they’re defending.
Software doesn’t just change the work. It has the power to change who you are at work. The organisations that come through AI won’t be the ones that adopt the most tools. They’ll be the ones willing to let the tools change their identity.
