Can an old dog teach an old man a new trick?

Can an old dog teach an old man a new trick? That is the question I had to ask myself.

Her name is Izzy, short for Isabelle. She is a Chihuahua mix, and those dogs live a long time. We adopted her from a shelter in 2012. At her first vet visit they guessed she was aged between 5 and 8, so she is close to 20 now. We take her one day at a time.

I am retired, which means I work from home, which means Izzy is my partner for most of the day. We share a room while I do my work. I keep half an eye on her to make sure she is not getting into something she should not.

Because she cannot handle the stairs the way she used to, I moved her food and water upstairs. I set the water dish on the right and the food dish on the left. A couple of months ago she started stepping into the water dish to reach the food. One wet foot, every time.

At first it was funny. After a while it was not. I would look at her and tell her to stop, your foot is wet. She would look back up at me like I was the one who did not understand. And I would look at her like she was the one doing something wrong.

Then one morning I was in a rush. Cleaning the room, getting her bowls ready, and without thinking I put the food on the right and the water on the left. I will never forget her face when she walked up to it. She looked at the food. Then she looked at me. And the look said, “You finally figured it out.”

Because that was it. All along she had been telling me she wanted the food on the right. From that day on she never stepped in the water again.

I would have gone on calling her a stubborn old dog if my daughter had not set me straight. She reminded me that downstairs, for all those years, the food had always been on the right. Izzy was not being difficult. She was asking for the one thing I had taken away without noticing. Consistency.

That is when it stopped being about the dog. The older we get, the more we lock into an idea of how things should be without ever asking why they are that way. Age is a strange gift. On one hand you have collected a lifetime of knowledge you can put to use. On the other hand, some of that knowledge has quietly expired, and you keep applying it anyway.

I had years of the food going on the left. I have no idea where that came from. Not my mother's kitchen. Not the house I grew up in. Just mine. And I was ready to treat Izzy like the problem rather than look at my own default.

I keep thinking about what that means for the rest of us as work changes and technology moves faster than we do.

I wrote once about John Henry, the man who raced the machine. The lesson most people take from that story is man against machine. The lesson I take is different. The steam drill was not the enemy. The mistake was treating a new tool as a reason to tear up the whole process instead of asking which parts of the process were worth keeping.

That is the same mistake I made with Izzy. I had a working arrangement. I moved it, changed it, and told her to adapt, when all I had to do was carry the good part upstairs with me.

I ran a large operation for 11 years. I watched every kind of technology change come through the door. The pattern was almost always the same. Somebody would arrive with a new platform and a slide deck and tell a room full of people who had been doing the work for 15 or 20 years that everything they were doing was about to be replaced. The message underneath was clear even when it was not spoken out loud. What you were doing was wrong. Start over.

And the room would deflate. Not because the new system was bad. Some of them were very good. The room would deflate because you had just told a room full of people that the pride they carried in their work was misplaced. That the way they had solved problems for two decades, the shortcuts they had designed, the customers they had learned by name, the judgment they had built one hard case at a time, none of it counted anymore. 

So they would nod through the presentation. Some of them would quietly retire. The ones who stayed would show up to the new system with their arms crossed, and a goal to break the new system to show everyone they were right the whole time. The rollout would go sideways, and the vendor would say the users were resistant to change. The users were not resistant to change. They were protecting the value of their career.

The best way to bring a new tool into a room is the opposite of that. You walk in and you say, here is what you have been doing well for twenty years, and here is a way to do more of it. You name the parts that are already working. You keep those parts. Then you show the tool as an amplifier, not a replacement. The dish still goes on the right. The food is just easier to reach now.

That is what good artificial intelligence adoption looks like too. Not a scorched field. An upgrade to a working process. The people who run the process are the ones who know which parts are load bearing. Ask them. Then keep what is load bearing and use the tool to strengthen the rest.

New technology should not ask us to throw out everything we know. It asks us to be honest about which of our habits still serve a purpose and which ones we are only repeating. That is a harder question than most vendors want to sit with. It is also the only question that matters.

And it asks something of those of us who are further down the road. Our job with the next generation is not to lead them. We may not be there for the part that matters most. Our job is to be stewards. To move them along with what we have learned, and then to get out of the way of what they will learn without us.

Hand them the knowledge. Let them adapt it to a world we will not fully see.

An old dog taught an old man that much. Not a new trick, exactly. An old one I had forgotten to question.

John Ginwright is the CEO of Ginwright Professional Services, a Missouri-based consulting firm specializing in child support policy, fatherhood program development, government grants and RFP response and AI-augmented program design. He spent 30 years in Missouri state government before founding the firm. He is currently enrolled in MIT Professional Education's Generative AI program and is a Missouri-certified MBE.