What's Changing? - Change

Please see below selected recent change-related content about change itself.

See also: 

• What's New? - Change
• What's Changing? - Therapy

February 2024

• ‘Motivational interviewing’ (MI) is a counselling approach developed by the clinical psychologists William R Miller and Stephen Rollnick. It’s all about emphasising change from within the client. MI practitioners use their counselling skills, such as open-ended questions and ways to reflect, to evoke what’s called change talk – a conversation about what clients are unhappy about and how they’d like to change. 

March 2023

• For a long time, psychologists saw personality as fixed throughout our lives. This has since been disproven - although personality is relatively stable, it’s far from set in stone. Typically, most personality changes occur in young and older adulthood, with middle age appearing to be the period of the greatest stability. Changes in personality can be driven by the natural ageing process or the influence of external factors, such as major life events and daily interactions with other people. Traits such as agreeableness typically increase with age, whereas neuroticism decreases, but individuals also vary in the ways that they change, noted Psyche.

June 2022

• Further reading:
  • Change Is Hard. Here’s How to Make It Less Painful - HBR
  • What would persuade you to change? - Financial Times

June 2021

• Our biology has saddled us with a range of cognitive habits which were sensible when they evolved (habits around sugar, sex, power, anxiety and excitement)… but which really hamper our effectiveness in the modern world. An understanding of the theory of evolution should move us to sympathy for why we do some of the deeply counterproductive things we do, believes The School of Life.

May 2021

• In an RSA Minimate, RSA chief executive Matthew Taylor introduced ‘co-ordination theory’ – a set of ideas about what motivates us and influences the ways we act together - from authority, values and belonging to individual aspiration and fatalism. This framework, he argued, can help us not only diagnose the critical challenges currently facing us - in our communities, workplaces, and public institutions - but embrace necessary changes and develop new ways to tackle and solve them. 

September 2020

• The rapid activation of global responses to the COVID-19 public health crisis has been compared to the lack of progress being made by a range of activists on various political, social, and environmental issues in recent years. A recurring sentiment was, “If the world can respond so quickly to COVID-19, what is stopping progress on other issues?” A 2017 article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review provided a framework for thinking about how people lead and succeed in social change efforts. After extensive research studying hundreds of social change initiatives over multiple years and interviewing social entrepreneurs, civil society leaders, and public officials around the world, Battilana identified three distinct roles, each with essential parts to play in establishing a pathway to change:
  • An agitator creates awareness of the grievances of specific individuals or groups
  • An innovator creates an actionable solution to address the problem
  • An orchestrator coordinates action across groups, organizations, and sectors to scale the proposed solution.

July 2020

• From the Peasants Revolt in 1381, to the French Revolution in the late 1700s, and recent protests in - among many places - Chile, Lebanon, Hong Kong and the US, the disruption of society to demand change has a long and powerful history. Protests have historically come in waves with momentum being carried across borders and transcending communities but, while the right to protest peacefully is protected, the consequences do not always reflect this. When civil rights, equality and democratic accountability are at stake, are protests guaranteed facilitators of change, asked Chatham House. Drawing on contemporary and historical examples from across the globe, it considered the tradition of protests and assessed how people move beyond protest to enact meaningful change. 

May 2020

• Big Think noted that we have a cognitive bias that tends to make us prefer the status quo, and focus more on the potential losses involved with change rather than the potential benefits. But here's a simpler strategy: When you're indecisive about a big life decision, choose the path of change.  That's the takeaway of research recently published in the Review of Economics Studies by Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago and host of the "Freakonomics" podcast.

April 2020

• In the light of all the sudden and dramatic changes to people's lifestyles caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Mark Earls, the author of Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature, explained that what behavioural economists call “redesigning the decision landscape” is initially exhausting, but made possible by enforced practice, and (crucially) the human impulse to imitate.

March 2020

• We tend to under-predict or over-predict change. The reason: imagining plausible outcomes forces us to confront our expectations and cherished beliefs. If we were to jot down descriptions of the future, we'd quickly find that they mirrored our own cognitive biases. We'd focus mainly on the subjects we already know well - like our work, company or industry - so we'd miss all of the related risk and opportunity ahead, argues the Future Today Institute.
• Learning to embrace change involves focusing on and making the most of the positives it creates. The School of Life advocates a practice called active adaptation, which involves not only reconciling ourselves to change but finding ways to make these changes function better. The practice borrows from a technique pioneered in improvisational comedy known as “Yes, and…” During scenes, when a performer makes a suggestion, their partner is not permitted to question or reject it; instead, they must accept and build on it by saying “Yes, and…” to whatever has been proposed. Active adaptation at work involves a similar process. Rather than complain about or attempt to resist changes, it involves instead channelling our talents and efforts into helping them work better.  

September 2019

• Launching major transformation efforts is a common way that business leaders try to get a leg up on the competition, or just keep their heads above water. But too many of these efforts fail. Change is difficult, and many people not only resist it but seek to undermine it. A McKinsey study found that merely 26% of transformation initiatives succeed. Most successful transformations have one thing in common: change is driven through empowerment, not mandated from the top.

June 2019

• BCG believes there is a gap between where most organisations are today and where they will need to be to succeed in the coming decades. The companies that win in the 2020s will be designed to constantly learn and adapt to changing realities, combine artificial and human intelligence in new ways, and harness the benefits of broader business ecosystems. Reaching this necessary future state will require a fundamental transformation. This change effort will be challenging. Many businesses have deeply entrenched operating systems that are predicated on hierarchy and human decision making. They will need to redesign their internal processes and build new capabilities and business models. Furthermore, this will not be a one-time change effort: the dynamic nature of business will require organisations to build capabilities for ongoing large-scale change to keep up with evolving technology and competition.

April 2019

• The School of Life believes that we spend a lot of time trying to change other people. There is, after all, so much wrong with them: they’re selfish, arrogant, bullying, weak, cold, needy and so on. So we try to point this out - and often meet with resistance, denial or sheer indifference. This can be very agitating and hence renders us cross and severe. Why won’t people take our lessons on board? In our behaviour, we tend to be making an implicit distinction between two projects: getting other people to change - and changing ourselves.
• The author, academic and former Obama administration ‘regulatory czar’, Cass Sunstein, has explored how change happens: be it gradual, such as the creeping prominence of social media in every facet of modern life, or rapid, such as the viral spread of the #MeToo movement and its international variants. Drawing on his work in behavioural economics, law and psychology, among other fields, Sunstein outlined the necessary components for realising change and how this understanding might allow us to recognise - and address - some of the key causes of damaging societal divisions.

March 2019

• We know, at least in theory, that things do change, but in practice - almost without noticing - we tend to distance ourselves and our own societies from a day-to-day belief that we belong to the same ongoing turbulent narrative and are, at present, its central actors. History, we feel, is what used to happen; it can’t really be what is happening around us in the here and now, claimed The School of Life.
• Chatham House examined what causes substantive political and social change, asking whether governments, groups or individuals really have any control and trying to understand why change so difficult to predict reliably or even to understand fully in retrospect.
   

December 2018

• The School of Life believes that it is in the end very understandable that change can often be frightening or at least sad: we will not be around for most of it. Lingering beneath our occasional lack of adaptability is a dread of the change that will one day wipe us away. It is because we are so exposed to change in ourselves that we seek to make or protect things that will outlast us, businesses included. 
• An organisational change expert argued that adapting a business in today's constantly-evolving world can be invigorating instead of exhausting and outlined five imperatives, centred around putting people first, for turning company reorganisation into an empowering, energising task for all.
• We need resolutions, argued The School of Life, as they are promises we make to change and better ourselves. But the New Year’s and related resolutions we tend to make are too often focused on our society’s idea of a perfect individual, rather than on changes that are right for us. 

November 2018

• Further reading:
  • School of System Change

October 2018

• In our behaviour, we tend to be making an implicit distinction between two projects: getting other people to change - and changing ourselves. We know we may have to develop in certain ways, but for now, our focus is on altering others, notes The School of Life. However, this misses an important insight: changing how you behave to others can be the fastest way to alter how others behave towards you.

September 2018

• Systems change has been attracting the attention of a range of progressive charities, funders and practitioners who are interested in dealing with the root causes of social problems.
• Further reading:
  • The soft side of operational change - McKinsey

August 2018

• Today, whatever the amplitude of the change, the frequency is much higher, argued The Book of the Future. We create, iterate, adopt and abandon new ideas and products at a much greater rate than at any point in history. We can see this in adoption curves for modern products versus those such as the washing machine: our hyper-connected societies spread these ideas much more quickly now. We can see it in the turnover of the stock markets: innovators displace incumbents faster than ever before. Whether the impact of the computer proves to be greater than the car or not, only history will tell. But it’s an impact that happened faster.
• According to The Juniper Company, the starting point towards addressing change in an organisation is effective communication. It is key that people’s perceptions of the impact of change are dealt with and underlying concerns are addressed. Without clear communication, a change initiative lacks clarity, very often resulting in a fear towards the change and a reluctance to take risks. It can be hard for employees to break away from habits when they use systems and processes that they trust. Therefore, they need to be engaged not only throughout the period of change but also, after the major elements of the plan have been implemented.

June-July 2018

• In Mind Set!, futurist John Naisbitt (author of Megatrends), advocates 11 mindsets, the first of which seems to give the lie to the hoary, ancient aphorism (pace Heraclitus), trotted out by the unthinking on a regular basis, that "change is the only constant".
• For example, mindset 1 is, while many things remain change, most things remain constant. Key ideas:
  • The seasons still -for many, though obviously for many fewer than before - determine the rhythm of life.
  • More things are like men's fashions than women's fashions - i.e. relatively unchanging.
  • More than 90% of new product launches are unsuccessful, suggesting that most consumers feel that they are doing just fine with what they have.
  • Home, family and work are - for many - great constants.

• Naisbitt concludes, perhaps convincingly, that "most of us are not hunting for news and change, but for orientation into the future, for clarity in a confusing world".