Earlier under Causes of Organization Failure I discussed faulty beliefs.  One of the faulty beliefs I listed was “People Resist Change.” Now I am about to tell you why people do in fact resist change.  Which is it? I cannot believe that “people do resist change” and also that “people do not resist change.” Actually I do.  The problem is in language and not what I want to communicate.   

When I spoke of the faulty belief, “people resist change,” I was speaking of the context in which we use it as an excuse for someone not adopting a change that we put forth.  They resist what we propose because of what we propose, or because of the way we propose it, or if they have prior experience with us they may resist because we always propose things that are not good for them.  They are not resisting simply to resist change.  People do change.

 In the current context I want to discuss the experience we all have of making a change that someone else thought was good (and sometimes ones we thought were good) only to discover that we were no better off and the effort of making the change had been wasted. 

 There is a fundamental reason for the common experience that changes are often not for the better.  Change is an evolutionary process.  I will discuss this in detail in the sections on theory.  Although, an evolutionary process is not just a trial and error process there is an unavoidable trial and error component.  To change to something better we must experiment.  Some of those experiments will not be improvements.  When looking back at the history of the evolution of any particular thing, such as music, hammers, knives, or organization structure, we tend to focus on the successful changes.  We often do not see the many discarded failures.  But, they are there.  When we experience evolution in real time, that is as it is inflicted upon us each day, we tend to see more of the failures than the successes.  This is understandable, evolutionary change theory clearly says there will be more failures than successes.  Only in the long run will the successes survive the failures and be remembered.

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