28 Oct That won’t work here

We’re building toward our 29th October WorldsView Conversation Café, where we’ll explore the stubborn persistence of silos and the bridges that reconnect them. You can read other recent articles that build up to the café conversation here. The October Café will touch on a familiar challenge: how do we listen before we rush to fix?

Few voices are as undervalued as the one that says, “That won’t work here.” It’s easy to dismiss that phrase as negativity. For decades, people who’ve said it have been labelled resistant to change, stuck in the past, fuddy-duddies.But perhaps they deserve a more careful hearing.

Imagine sitting in a design workshop. The HR team are unveiling a new digital self-service tool that would, in their words, “empower managers to handle all their people processes independently.”

At the back of the room, a shift manager leans forward, frowning. “That won’t work here,” he says. Awkward laughter follows – polite, patronising.

But months later, the tool still isn’t used. By any line manager. The problem wasn’t attitude; it was architecture. The design team had built a system for managers who had time to sit at desks and who had experience navigating South Africa’s complex labour laws. These line managers had neither. What looked like resistance was, in fact, deep local knowledge – an understanding of how work happens.

In our consulting work, we often hear “That won’t work here.” Sometimes it comes from the disengaged or the cynical – but just as often, it comes from those most loyal to the organisation. And sometimes, it comes from us too, when we’re asked to help roll out a solution unlikely to solve the underlying issue.

The phrase can mean three very different things, depending on who says it and how we listen.

First, it can signal the experienced hands – that rich, intuitive sense of how things really function. Experienced scepticism can sound like obstruction, but when mined for insight, it reveals system truths.

Second, it can represent the experienced head – a voice of solid analysis, data-driven, grounded in evidence. This is the quiet realism of people who have seen many initiatives come and go and can distinguish between new packaging and true innovation.

Third, it can express the inexperienced gut – fresh eyes noticing obstacles that veterans can’t. Sometimes these new eyes are exaptive, drawing inspiration from different domains to spark innovation. Other times, they import solutions from misfit contexts, creating future design debt – layering new fixes atop old, unresolved issues.

Or it can be the start of collaboration – an invitation to co-design. When sceptics, analysts, and novices are brought together around real prototypes, “That won’t work here” becomes “Here’s what could.”

Innovation and system design always carry a tension between learning from the outside and honouring what already works inside. The risk is not change itself, but poorly contextualised change – solutions lifted from elsewhere and dropped into a system that smells different.

We’ve seen this in the roll-out of HR and IT systems, in the force-fitting of global “best practices,” and in the parachuting of change methodologies that promise transformation but deliver fatigue. The result? Another round of change, another layer of frustration, and another cycle of “That didn’t work here.”

It takes courage to speak up against the momentum of a change wave. That courage is often born of loyalty to colleagues, customers, and the craft of getting things done. When those voices are invited in rather than pushed aside, the conversation changes. Even if the sceptic is not won over, their insight helps craft a stronger, more sustainable design.

At WorldsView Academy, we’ve learned that even when time is short, there are ways to build collaboration instead of compliance. Sometimes it means mining resistance for insight or turning doubt into dialogue. What emerges is not immediately consensus, but (importantly) connection that leads to commitment.

Good leadership is not about silencing doubt but about transforming it into design intelligence. When scepticism is mined, novices guided, and users co-create, the organisation becomes adaptive, relational, and capable of learning its way forward.

That is partly what we’ll explore together at our October Café: Beyond the Silo: Bridging the Gap Between Support and Core Business. It’s a 90-minute, online session (29 October, 09:00–10:30 SAST) and free to attend.

Click here to register and bring your stories of when “That won’t work here” turned out to be the wisest thing said in the room.