Essay 18

Essay 18: Resistance to Change

Exactly what is resistance to change and why do we have so much trouble with it? Rather than build up to a conclusion in this essay, I am going blurt out the answer and then go back and justify it. Resistance to change is really resistance to having to adjust. We don’t like having to adjust because it is unpleasant. It interferes with the orderliness and predictability of our lives.

Yes, yes, I can hear challenges saying that too much orderliness and predictability in life is not a good thing either. It makes like boring. We need challenges and new things to feel alive. I totally agree with this and would like to address it before moving on. Suppose you were planning to go out with some friend and had decided to wear your blue sweater. But you discovered a stain on it, so you wore your grey sweater instead. This is an adjustment but a very minor one and most people take these in stride. On the other hand, suppose you went into your office one morning and found a pink slip, so you had to clean out your desk and find a new job. This would be a major adjustment. It would be very unpleasant even if the eventual outcome, which you would not know, was a much better job which you enjoyed much more. So, it is big adjustment that we try to avoid. How big?

Suppose you live on the edge of a pond, but you never go swimming in it because you don’t like the mud and the dirty water. The bottom of the pond is icky on your bare feet and the water is so dark that you cannot see your hand in front of your face. And the water is cold. Nowhere near freezing. But cold.

One day a forest fire catches your house on fire forcing you to run out the front door to the edge of the pond. There is a searing, crackling hot fire behind you and the muddy, murky pond in front of you. If you jump into the pond and swim to the other side, you can save your life. But the pond is dark and cold and icky. If you stay where you are you will be barbecued without the sauce. What would you do? You would jump into the pond cold and dark and icky as it might be because it is by far the lesser of two evils. One of my favorite Gerald Weinberg quotes is “people will only change to keep something bigger from changing.”

But there is no resistance to change here. You know that you have two options, and you know what they are. What we have here is resistance to adjust any more than we have to. And there is little uncertainty about the two outcomes.

Some say resistance to change is really resistance to not knowing what is going to happen. Or it may be thinking you know what will happen and you don’t like it. Within a very small scope of influence, we can make changes. For example, you can change the drapes in your house, and you only need to get your spouse to agree. Let us say instead that you want to change the rules within your Homeowners Association. You will have to get more people than your spouse to agree. As the scope of the change increases the number of people that have to agree increases. As the scope of the change increases even further, people you don’t even know will have to buy into your idea in large enough numbers that the change becomes a social phenomenon. For change of that scope there are usually one or more people who dedicate themselves to a change (see Essay 12 – Clownfish) but this usually only works when large numbers of people are ready for a change and some people feel called to facilitate it. It is unlikely, no matter how charismatic you may be, to convince a large number of people to change if they really liked the way things were already.

But, in order to change things, you have to understand why people are resistance to change.

1) They think things are going to change in a way they don’t like

2) They don’t know what the outcome of the change will be

3) They may think the change is OK, but peer pressure keeps them from accepting it

Change of any kind requires adjusting. The greater the change the greater and/or the less desirable the outcome the greater the adjustment.

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