“We’ve never done it that way before!” or “We’ve tried that once, it didn’t work!”
Over the years I’ve heard both of those phrases more than I care to think. These speak to our reaction to “Change”.
I took on this post at the recommendation of a cousin, D, who asked me to talk about “Change: it’s the one constant in life yet most of us are change-averse. Why is that?”
D is right. All things change. It’s a fact of life. It’s a reality of the world around us. I suspect that there is a direct relationship between this fact of life and something called the “Knowledge Doubling Curve”.
Buckminster Fuller noticed that until 1900, human knowledge doubled approximately every century. But with the twentieth century, things sped up. By the end of World War II, our knowledge doubled every 25 years. Today, the full extent of human knowledge is doubling every 13 months, on average.
And here is something really staggering: some sources predict that soon, human knowledge will double every TWELVE HOURS.
(Source for the “Knowledge Doubling Curve” is at: http://www.industrytap.com/knowledge-doubling-every-12-months-soon-to-be-every-12-hours/3950 )
So, what does this increase in knowledge have to do with change? New knowledge brings with it the necessity of change. Refusing to change means that we ignore all the new knowledge coming to light. It means we are saying, in effect, “I will not acknowledge new information. I will choose, instead, to exist in ignorance.” Or we can choose to adapt to the new knowledge by refining our behavior. We change. Maybe subtly, maybe drastically.
But in previous eras, the amount of knowledge to which we had to adapt was relatively small. Today, it is simply staggering.
I wonder if in some way change and resistance to it are related to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. According to this theory, all of our various needs are predicated on a hierarchy, and cannot be actualized until those needs lower in the hierarchy are realized. The lowest, most basic needs are physiological (breathing, food, water, etc.) At the top, are things like morality, creativity, spontaneity, etc.
Just above our physiological needs is “Safety”, or as I learned years ago, security, stability and freedom from fear. Security relies on the ability to create constancy in our lives.
Change challenges constancy. And, for some of us, it may appear to challenge that constancy on a very basic level. Change creates tension in our own hierarchy of need.
And I’ll add in another theory to go with these previous two (Knowledge Doubling, Maslow.) This third theory isn’t, I don’t think, much of a theory, as it is a physiological response. That is the “Fight or Flight Response”.
With new knowledge, comes the need to change. But the need to change challenges our sense of security or constancy, which in turn causes us to feel some degree of fear which we perceive as a threat to our survival. This in turn triggers a discharge of the sympathetic nervous system which sets us up to either fight off the challenge, or flee for safety. But we might modify this, in this case of change, to say that fight or flight becomes fight(resist) or flight(accept) that change.
That’s just my theory. I could go on to say, maybe how we individually respond to adrenalin rushes might be indicative of how we respond to change. If we get off on the rush, we might be more inclined to embrace change. If we find the rush uncomfortable or something to avoid, we resist. Or that could just be horse-pucky.
What do YOU think?
On The Road II 