The chasm, Margaret McGrew, and the evolving story of tech adoption

A few blogs ago, we wrote about our fantasy Early Adopter Club™ and why we think the membership includes you (and us). It’s the slightly thrilling place we occupy when we try something new before the rest of the world is completely ready.

We love it when people respond to our weekly blogs. That week, our favourite comment came with a personal story and a history lesson rolled into one. Walter Robertson ‘reached out’, as folks like to say on LinkedIn, and shared a story that connects the roots of innovation theory to a family history— with a twist that feels too neat to be real, but is.

In 1901, Margaret McGrew became the first person in Ohio to be killed by a car. Her death sparked sharply divided reactions in her community: most people agreed that cars were dangerous machines that should be banned; others viewed the new inventions as inevitable progress (with some work needed to improve public safety).

Margaret’s brother Dan McGrew was deeply affected — not only by the loss, but by the different ways people responded. The full story on the Diffusion Research Institute website is worth a read. Dan spent the rest of his life working to understand our complicated relationship with New Things, helping communities adopt ideas — first in agriculture and later as a professor at Ohio State University. It was there that he worked alongside Everett Rogers, who was studying how farmers adopt innovations. Rogers’ work became the Diffusion of Innovations theory —the now-familiar curve of innovators, early adopters, the early majority, and so on.

Decades later, Dan’s grandson, Warren Schirtzinger, was working in Silicon Valley when he adapted that same theory for high-tech markets. He added something his grandfather had experienced: the idea of a chasm between early adopters and the early majority — the psychological and emotional gap that makes it hard for new ideas to spread, even when they’re good ones.

The story stopped me in my tracks. Partly because it struck a personal chord: I found myself wishing I’d made the connection sooner between how we respond to trauma in life and how we accept or resist change in general, as Dan had. It also held my attention because Walter and Warren are now my LinkedIn connections, and I’m a tiny bit in awe. Mostly, it stood out because it’s a powerful reminder: innovation isn’t just a technical challenge — it’s a human one. People bring their stories, their hesitations, and their histories with them whenever they face something new.

That’s inevitably true with generative AI. At Leading AI, wework in partnership with early adopters of tools like RAG AI — not because thetools are perfectly polished, but because the people using them help to makethem better. Our work only becomes meaningful when it’s embedded in real teams,real services, and real communities.

It’s much easier to cross a chasm if you’re not alone. So if you’re in that early crowd — curious, pragmatic, up for helping shape the future — let’s talk.