Gartner’s Technology Hype Cycle is well-understood.

When adopting any new technology, technical teams tend to go through the following phases:

• The Technology Trigger 
• The Peak of Inflated Expectations
• The Trough of Disillusionment
• The Slope of Enlightenment and, finally
• The Plateau of Productivity

Most of the time, this cycle is unavoidable. Or is it?

If you are considering, or have recently adopted, MuleSoft as your Integration technology, you can buck the trend with a Mule Whisperer!

By engaging a Whisperer who has already achieved that Zen state — the Plateau of Productivity — your company can avoid the pain that comes from:

• Inflated Expectations and
• Disillusionment

The reason teams across the world constantly re-live this cycle is because of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. See the chart below; 

If this chart looks familiar, it is because the Dunning-Kruger Effect follows exactly the same trend as Gartner’s Technology Hype Cycle. The Dunning-Kruger Effect asserts that the less competent a person is at a given task (E.g. a new technology), the more likely they are to overestimate their ability, or competence, with respect to that task. This is because they don’t know what they don’t know; a person who is not yet competent doesn’t know they are not yet competent.

This results in  inflated expectations. Only when that person  undertakes the task do they begin to understand what they don’t know. At this point, they transition to  a place where  they begin to discover what they don’t know. This is when they plummet into the trough of disillusionment.

Many give up at this point but those who power through will learn what they don’t know and progress up the slope of enlightenment. That journey culminates at the plateau of productivity. 

In the MuleSoft context, we have a name for those rare people who reach this elusive destination — we call them Mule Whisperers.

Of course, if you start out by including a Mule Whisperer in your team right from the outset, you can buck the Hype Cycle trend. Consider the chart below;

The red line follows the standard Technology Hype Cycle pattern. However, by engaging The Mule Whisperer in the early stages, your team will be able to:

• Up-Skill faster
• Manage Expectations and
• Avoid Disillusionment

… by leveraging the expertise of someone who has already been through the curve. On this new curve, shown in blue above, your Mule Whisperer will guide and train your team through the early stages of the cycle. 

This will short-cut the cycle and lead your team straight to the Slope of Enlightenment. By doing this, your team will become productive (i.e. reach the plateau of productivity) sooner, thus delivering results faster.

There is an additional benefit, however. By avoiding the pitfalls, your team’s solutions will be cleaner and will contain less technical debt. This will forever raise your team’s productivity and continue to drive value going forward.

In other words, the benefits are not only immediate; they are also permanent.