David Bowler

Scotland

Archaeologist

What you are up against looks like stupidity, but is in fact a fundamental principle of change management.

In surgery, a lot of the skill is not in making the necessary improvements in the patient's body, but in keeping the patient alive all the way through the process, moment by moment (there is no other way of being alive).

In Darwinian evolution, all succesful changes have to convey an immediate benefit. Pain today for gain tomorow never happens, because tomorrow is invisible to natural selection.

Also, in the workplace, workers naturally resist change, because they know that most of the cost of change will fall on them individually, in the form of unpaid overtime trying to catch up after a period of disruption.

If you want to change a large and complex organisation, you have to break up the change into small pieces, each one of which has to be seamless and painless, because the organisation has to go on fuctioning at full power while the change is happening.

Think long-term, but everything has to work in the short term. As Keynes said, 'In the long run, we are all dead.' And to quote Eric Clapton,

'If I can't make it through tomorrow,
I guess I'd better make it through today.'