Technology & Cultural Alignment
When a technology finds cultural alignment, magic happens. But it's hard and can mean the difference between success and failure for technology products. Why?
One of the most important factors around any technology becoming successful is how it aligns with cultures. If there is no or very weak cultural alignment, a technology struggles to succeed. In today’s hyper-connected, highly technological societies this becomes increasingly important.
Cultural misalignment has hampered the adoption of Web3, blockchain, crypto, AR and VR technologies and others. Why and what does this mean for the future of digital technologies? For technology companies that understand the importance of cultural alignment, their chances of success are much greater than those who don’t.
What is Cultural Alignment?
Let’s start by understanding what Cultural Alignment (CA) is and why it’s so important when it comes to technology. Especially at a time when we are rapidly innovating with digital technologies in particular.
Culture is often mislabeled today as meaning just the arts, which is the aesthetic part of culture. Culture also includes political and economic systems, social norms, behaviours and traditions, how we govern our societies, militaries and values. These differ around the world and are always evolving. Humans created culture as a means of survival where biological evolution was too slow.
When we talk of cultural alignment as anthropologists, this means our social norms, traditions, customs and behaviours. These factors influence how a technology is viewed, evaluated and adopted. If a technology is out of alignment with a culture, from a broader perspective all the way to the workplace, it will struggle to succeed.
Sometimes a technology will be misaligned, but will be realigned by a culture that sees potential, and later become successful. Take agriculture as an example. Many cultures tried and rejected agricultural technologies because they weren’t seen as aligning with the values, traditions and social norms of a culture. So it took around 4,000 years for agriculture to evolve and find cultural alignment. Then we invented candy and dentists. Sugary sweet progress.
Cultural Misalignment and Technologies
In many developing nations, the treadle pump, a suction form of pump that is of simple construction where people use their legs muscles to pump water up, was very successfully introduced and in some cases is still used today. It failed terribly when it was first introduced in Bangladesh.
Bangladeshi culture saw the use of the treadle pump by women as being too provocative. It was culturally misaligned. The fix? Redesigning the mechanics of the pedals.
Some Western tech companies have considered, and are trying to copy, the Asian model of the superapp on phones. So far, this hasn’t succeeded. Superapps like WeChat in China are highly successful because of cultural factors like social norms and behaviours that are different from Western cultures. Asian cultures are far more social in their nature whereas Western cultures tend to be more individualistic.
Western societies prefer, for now, more specialized single-function apps, from banking to fitness. Asian cultures are very efficiency driven in ways different from Western cultures, which adds to their preference for more services within one app. Neither is wrong or right, they’re just cultural preferences.
Sometimes there may be a whole new set of technologies that do similar things and despite gaining market traction, are still seen as causing more headaches than solving a problem. This can be seen with the wave of apps that were supposed to make email extinct; Slack, Teams, Google Meet, Facebook for Work and so on. Email remains top of the heap. Email has found cultural alignment across many global cultures and generations. Like the telephone and television.
When Culture and Technology Align It’s Magical
Revolutionary technologies like the printing press and telephone and now Generative AI rarely find immediate mass cultural acceptance because they’re out of alignment with cultural norms, traditions and behaviours.
It may well be why Amara’s Law is so important. It states, simply, that we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short term and underestimate the effect in the long run.
The iPhone only saw mass cultural acceptance because it integrated a number of technologies that had already found cultural alignment; email, internet access, camera and so on. Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and Midjourney are struggling to find cultural alignment. For now. Society is debating where these technologies fit economically, socially, politically and militarily. And most importantly, how GAI aligned with our traditions, social norms and behaviours. Eventually, alignments will be found as culture works to sort these issues out.
When technologies find alignment is when they then become successful. Part of this alignment process I’ve outlined before in the three stages of adopting and adapting technology; awareness, evaluation and adaptation. Underlying all of these is cultural alignment.
Cultural alignment of technologies is seen at varying degrees from digital tools designed for productivity in business and manufacturing through to much broader social technologies like social media and Generative AI.
One reason Apple products have been so successful is that Apple has long included anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists in its product development teams. Google and Microsoft have also started to realize the value of humanities sciences in product development and are increasingly bringing them into the corporate fold.
In a world of rapid innovation with digital technologies, understanding cultures, how they vary, evolve and view technologies is becoming increasingly important to the success of a technology product.
One of the challenges however, is that because our world is so hyper-connected, research is showing that the speed of cultural transmission has also become faster. This presents both opportunity to develop more valuable and meaningful technology products but also risks being out of alignment much faster or missing the alignment opportunity.
In this dynamic building a technology product is much easier and faster today, but finding cultural alignment, especially with social technologies, can be more complex and tricky, making for difficult tradeoffs. A topic I will explore in a future article.
Full cultural alignment is achieved when a society, community or business have gone through the awareness, evaluation and adaptation phases. So it varies depending on market and sociocultural system a given technology is entering.
Understanding cultural alignment can help businesses evaluating new information technologies from ERP software to messaging tools. It can help product managers, designers and developers along with marketers to design and launch technology products with a greater chance of success.