Why Change?

Why are most people tired at the end of their workday? Not
because they've had to do so much physically demanding work.
Most jobs are not physically tiring. Running down a Mastodon
-- that's tiring. In an "information" economy, most people's
jobs are not hard physically. I had an inside sales job
where I was on my feet much of the day and, yes, at the end
of the day my feet hurt. But I still went to the gym after
work at least three or four times a week.

The reason most people are tired at the end of the average
workday is because they are bored to death. They are bored!
If you've ever had a job -- and some of you have one right
now -- where you were bored most of the time, you know, your
job is a series of stupid emails, and pointless,
interminable meetings (and if you haven't had a job like
this yet, you probably will).

Being bored is exhausting. People come home at the end of
the day from jobs like this exhausted. They can barely lift
the fork to get the food into their mouth. No wonder
television is so popular -- the programming is crappy,
stupid, ridiculous, and insulting, but it's not boring. It's
at least better than being bored.

So business as usual is boring. Change is not boring.
Changing is hard. Changing is work. Until you get the train
rolling. Think about a train in the station, just leaving,
just getting underway. What happens? Does it start off BOOM
70 miles an hour? Of course not. It starts off very slowly.
At first, the train's motion is barely perceptible.

(Have you ever had the experience, in a train or a car,
where someone outside walks or drives by in the opposite
direction and makes you feel like you're moving when you're
not?)

It's hard to get something as big as a train moving. How
much does your average 100-car freight train weigh? A lot.
To get that mass moving at all takes a huge investment of
energy.

But you know what? Once it's moving, that huge mass moving
at a high speed, it has acquired momentum.

The Queen Mary, the ocean liner, takes seven miles to stop.
So if you're coming in to the dock, you're not thinking
about stopping when you enter the port. You'd better be
thinking about it much earlier. Way way out to sea, like
seven miles out. (Captain: "I'm going to have to stop way
over there, but I'd better start thinking about it NOW.")

What's hard is getting the momentum built up in the first
place. Once you have the momentum going -- and most big
organizations that have been around a while have this --
they have a tendency to keep going in the same direction,
because it's hard for them -- impossible really -- to turn
on a dime.

The point is that to change, you have to change the
momentum. You cannot count on the environment to change your
momentum. For things to change for you, you've got to
change. For the momentum of an organization to change or be
redirected, you must take action to cause that change to
happen. For things to get better for you or your
organization, you or your organization have to get better.
And that almost always means changing.

Using the Pareto Perspective is one of the ways of
identifying and implementing change. It's not the be-all and
end-all. I'm not pretending that it is. But it is a very
powerful way of implementing change with a very simple
Paradigm Shift (a term coined by Thomas S. Kuhn in his 1962
book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). An abused
term, but nevertheless still valid. Paradigm Shift in
simplest terms means changing the way you think about
things, your constructs, you world-view.

So by extension, for things to change for you, you've got to
change your thinking. Which leads to "for things to change
for you, you've got to change your actions."

Insanity has been defined as doing the same things over and
over again yet expecting a different result. No wonder
people end up in asylums -- and corporations end up in
bankruptcy court.

People and companies would rather be able to do the same
thing and get better results because something else changes
-- the world, for example. Not going to happen. 9/11 not
withstanding, things are going to be pretty much like
they've always been.

Yes, there'll be some tweaking of things at the margins, but
the momentum of the world-as-we-know-it will continue pretty
much intact, until and unless there is a MAJOR catastrophe
(like a really big rock falling out of the sky -- as has
happened several times before). So we have to change. Our
companies have to change. We have to get better. Our
companies have to get better.

Or we -- and they -- will get extinct.