The 'Walk to the Printer' Problem

We’ve all been there: You’re implementing a new piece of technology that promises a clear efficiency win, yet you’re met with unexpected friction and resistance from the team. The logic is sound, the benefits are obvious, but something isn’t clicking.

A powerful lesson from my consulting career (from over 10 years ago now), a lesson I call the “‘walk to the printer’ moment” highlights this example of process optimisation and change management.

I was working with a large non-profit, implementing new software part of which automated sending standard letters to donors. Previously, this was a manual task: an agent would print a letter, which necessitated a walk over to the printer. Logically, automating this was a simple, obvious improvement and the consulting team and I were excited to see the reactions of the donor support team when we enabled them to work more efficiently. Instead of printing letters individually, the software would batch all such letters and print them all at once at the right moment in the day for collating and posting (let’s not mention emails for the purposes of this process optimisation annecdote).

In reality, this became a hard change management moment.

The team struggled with the new process, and leadership couldn’t understand why. The issue wasn’t the technology. We worked it through with the team and discovered that the walk to the printer had become an unofficial, unacknowledged micro-break. It was a moment to stretch, to clear one’s head, to connect with a colleague. The team wasn’t resisting the automation; they were resisting the loss of a sanctioned break from their screen.

The breakthrough came when we reframed the problem. Instead of using an inefficient process to enable breaks, the leadership needed to provide proper, scheduled breaks for their staff. This is something I return to in Before You Build the AI Tool, Ask Whether the Problem Should Exist — before you automate anything, interrogate whether the process itself is the right one to keep. This would empower the team to rest and recharge, while allowing the new software to handle communications far more quickly.

It seems obvious once you’ve understood and created a solution, but at the time, and in the weeds of the consultancy, these kinds of situations can be tricky to predict.

This is the exact challenge and opportunity we face today as the AI boom supercharges the conversation around automation. The resistance to modern, AI-powered tools is rarely about the technology itself. It is about disrupting habits and addressing the hidden benefits of old, inefficient workflows. In the creative industries, and publishing in particular, this resistance can be even more profound: There is a deeply felt and valid concern that many foundational AI models were trained on vast libraries of copyrighted material (our authors’ books) without permission or compensation. For many, using these tools feels like rewarding the very companies that have profited from this piracy. This is another, more complex, “walk to the printer” moment: The resistance isn’t about the workflow, it’s about deeply held values. Overcoming it requires acknowledging the legitimacy of the concern, not just dismissing it as resistance to change.

Acknowledging these valid concerns is the only ethical way to move forward, and we must move forward. It’s truly exciting to see the current AI enthusiasm encouraging businesses to invest seriously in automation (with and without the natural langugage capabilities of LLM-enabled AI). Today’s tools can do so much more than just automate a letter. They can summarise reports, draft communications, and handle routine queries, freeing up our teams for the complex, creative, and empathetic work that only humans can do. Work like developmental editing that forges a deeper connection with an author, or marketing that builds genuine community around a new voice.

With a Change Management hat on, pre-empting and creating the vision for the complex, creative, and empathetic work that only humans can do, is going to be critical to the success of these optimisations. Without it, we aren’t creating the future vision our teams can buy into and get excited about.

I’ve since come to believe that the traditional change management approach itself is part of the problem. In Change Management is Dead; Long Live Change Enablement, I argue that situations like the printer story call for enablement frameworks rather than top-down control.

Our task as leaders, is not just to implement these new tools. It is to first identify those “walk to the printer” moments in our current processes. We need to understand the human needs they are fulfilling, address those needs directly and compassionately, and then, and only then, unleash automation to make our work more efficient and, ultimately, more human.

What “walk to the printer” processes are still holding your organisation back, not because of the process itself, but because of the hidden needs it serves?