Catalyzing AM Adoption: Addressing Psychological Barriers

Despite optimistic predictions from the mid-2010s, additive manufacturing (AM) has struggled to achieve widespread adoption, especially in sectors like aerospace where the promise of on-demand, flight-ready parts has not fully materialized. Alison Wyrick-Mendoza, Founder and Managing Director of Outlook Lab, suggests this stagnation is not due to technical limitations but a fundamental disconnect in how AM's value is communicated.

Wyrick-Mendoza, who has consulted with ASTM International, applied Jonah Berger's "REDUCE" framework – which identifies psychological barriers like Reactance, Endowment, Distance, Uncertainty, Corroborating Evidence, and Encouragement of others – to key audiences: internal engineering and operations teams, external investors, and regulators.

For engineers, she advises presenting AM as one option among many for self-identified problems, rather than pushing it. For investors, she recommends workshops where participants discover the technology's benefits organically, fostering a sense of partnership. To overcome the "endowment" barrier, where people overvalue existing processes, she suggests reframing AM adoption not as a new cost, but as a way to recoup existing financial losses from inefficiencies like tooling storage and scrap.

Addressing the "distance" barrier, which relates to how far a proposed change deviates from current understanding, Wyrick-Mendoza uses the analogy of a football field, advocating for small, compounding gains over a single large leap. She suggests drawing parallels with technologies like SaaS or cloud computing, which also faced initial skepticism. She noted that her experience in driving enterprise AI adoption among 60,000 employees encountered similar psychological hurdles, indicating the broad applicability of these communication strategies for emerging technologies.