You’ve heard it said a thousand times: ‘People hate change’. But how can that be right?
People travel. They renovate. They do evening classes. They change partners, jobs, and postcodes. They marry, take out mortgages, have affairs, divorce and remarry. They protest, they vote, they lobby, they invest.
Maybe we actually want change; it’s just that we just hate being changed.
At our core, we humans crave two, seemingly incompatible experiences.
We want delight, variety, adventure and the promise of new opportunities… but we also demand certainty, predictability, reliability and the guarantee of control. Somehow, we like surprises while at the same time insisting that we hate being surprised.
But we always somehow manage to reconcile the two; every hairstyle, fashion choice, tattoo or piercing is a fragile balancing act of freedom and control – a new me, on my terms.
Why Do We React
How people feel about change has a lot to do with which end of it they’re on.
it’s exciting for those driving it, exhausting for the rest of us. Which is why it’s so important to give people as much agency as possible – grant us authorship and we’ll take ownership.
And while we’re at it, let’s think about retiring the word ‘change’ – it’s a vague term that means too many different things to different people; it can mean ‘progress’ ‘transformation’ ‘improvement’ ‘evolution’… or ‘chaos’ ‘mayhem’ ‘upheaval’ and ‘disorder’.
But no matter what you call it, let’s all embrace the fact that journey from Business As Usual to World’s Next Practice is bound to be a bumpy ride, particularly in the early stages, which is usually when disruption is at its highest, resistance is at its deepest and the benefits are still to make an appearance.
We’ve learned to see ‘change’ as three act interplay of Pain and Gain.
This is when people need constant assurance that the turbulence is just a necessary and predictable part of the journey, one that will pass as we transition into…
The benefits we were all promised are slowly making themselves felt and some people are openly admitting that things might be getting a little better. Spread the good news.
Whatever discomfort we all felt in the beginning becomes increasingly abstract as we adapt to the new way and begin to wonder out loud what the big deal was in the first place.