We’ve long been told, “Change is hard.” The prevailing wisdom is that people don’t like to change.
I was recently dealing with a leader who was trying to make organizational process changes. Very few on the team adopted the new processes. They didn’t argue in the meeting when it was introduced. But they went right back to their regular work, doing things the same way they’d always done.
That’s when the mantras come out, “People don’t like change. Change is hard.” Leadership is about getting people to change behavior. Yet when leaders encounter resistance, the tendency is to blame the people. Either overtly, attributing malice. Or benignly, attributing the lack of behavior change to natural human resistance.
But in my experience, people are absolutely capable of change, and fast. If you look at the rapid social changes of the last two decades gay marriage, an African- American President, women as viable candidates for Commander in Chief and compare these changes to the previous thousand years, our world is on fire for change. Within a decade we went from not knowing what an iPhone was to becoming addicted to them. You might argue that people resisted these things, and some did. But the majority of people changed, and they changed fast.
Edward Deming, founder of the Total Quality movement, taught any time the majority of the people behave a particular way the majority of the time, the people are not the problem. People are not resistant to change. They’re resistant to doing additional work that adds no value to their daily life.