Organization 21C: Someday All Organizations Will Lead This Way

Change Management and Hard-Wired Resistance

It is often and wrongly said that we humans possess an inbuilt and “natural” resistance to change. This is not true. As Richard Beckhard and others have recognized, people willingly accept change if they see it as in their interests and feel they can retain some control over the means of implementation. The problem of change management is that people possess a bunch of illusory beliefs about self and society that derail the process at any of its stages, from conception to implementation. These same beliefs also mean that the insights of evolutionary psychology are often dismissed out of hand, and cannot be readily deployed to help evade the traps we repeatedly fall into. They include the following. ...