The Unit of Adoption

Organisations do not adopt models. They adopt configurations of seven elements, of which the model is one, and because the other six vary across a business the same model can succeed at a desk and fail on a warehouse floor with nothing about the model changing. This paper names those elements as capability, interface and modality, channel and device, user capability, task, physical setting and organisational legitimacy, and groups them into the tool, the route, the work and the institution. It argues that the acceptance tradition, for all its explanatory power, compresses the material circumstances of use into a belief, so it can record that staff felt unsupported without capturing that the screen was small and their hands were full. A six-step pilot protocol follows: describe the baseline across all seven elements, vary one at a time, run in the setting where the work happens, keep a configuration log, read results by configuration, then adopt a named configuration with an owner. Pilot results should carry their configuration as laboratory results carry their conditions. The model is a synthesis and has not been tested as a whole.