It's a word that inspires the young, terrifies the middle-aged, and bores the old; the stock-in-trade of the new broom; the lingua franca of the middle manager and the politician from banal British ex-chancellors to aspiring US Presidents. The word is change.
Nothing stays the same quite as much as change, as the French might say. Every time someone runs out of ideas - seemingly quite often these days - the C-word is taken from its rather undusty shelf, rolled around the tongue a few times to spruce it up, and delivered as though it were a breathtakingly original insight.
Why does the mention of change affect us so much? Well, the act of thinking is one thing that people badly want not to have to do - social norms exist to save us the inconvenience of having to think. If we had to constantly re-evaluate all the things that might affect our lives - from which side of the road to drive on to whether to wear a swimming costume to the office - we'd have no time to do anything else[1].
So over the centuries, societal norms have arisen that we come to know and stick to; many are now entrenched in law. These norms work well - few people get killed on the roads because they deliberately drive on the wrong side; no one wearing a snorkel has ever sold a luxury home.
An entire ecosystem has evolved to relieve us of the burden of having to think for ourselves. Churches, governments, companies and other organisations provide for their employees and their customers a refuge from the scourge of independent thinking. The larger and more venerable the institution, the more entrenched are its norms and the less thinking is necessary.
Change is a blunt instrument that threatens this cosy and successful arrangement. It's no surprise that the young embrace it - they haven't yet had the time to fully appreciate the benefits of norms and the consequences of removing them. Conversely, it's easy to see why larger and older organisations react to its mention so vehemently.
Human social systems are grounded in habit and inertia. Change is no more than empty rhetoric to garner a few votes from the immature or to shake up a fossilised department. Radical change does occur, but rarely and usually with consequences other than those intended by the instigators.
If you want an easy life, stay clear of change, and vice versa.
Reference
1. Critical Mass by Philip Ball (Arrow Books, 2005, paperback edition), p383ff.
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