I am a change agent. May be we all are change agents.
During a recent change management episode, I was reminded of a long-ago conversation I had with a friend conducting research towards his PhD thesis. One of the outcomes of his studies, he claimed, was a relationship between longevity and the regularity of the schedule one does his shopping. Turns out, according to him, that a regular shopping schedule is a predictor variable of longevity.
Why? The speculation at the time was that it was correlated to a regular routine and it was the consistency of one’s routine that was the real driver of longevity.
So, if routine is extends life, then it’s not a big leap to reverse the logic and say that change disrupts routine which impacts longevity which is basically change=death. And therein lies the challenge one faces in attempting to implement change.
So why would anyone accept change? Obviously the new alternative needs to be seen to be more desirable than the status quo. Put another way, the impact to routine needs to be seen as outweighed by the benefit offered by the change. How you do that is the subject of many books.
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