People often resist change for reasons that make good sense to them, even if those reasons don't correspond to organizational goals. So it is crucial to recognize, reward, and celebrate accomplishments.
Interpretation
People resist change due to their own beliefs and motivations, which might not align with the goals of an organization. Recognizing and celebrating achievements can help facilitate necessary changes.
This quote emphasizes the common tendency of individuals to resist change, driven by personal beliefs and justifications that may conflict with the objectives of an organization. It highlights the importance of acknowledging and celebrating individual accomplishments as a means to foster a culture that is more adaptable to change. By aligning individual motivations with organizational goals through recognition, a more cohesive and supportive environment for change can be created.
In practice
In a team meeting, I shared this quote to encourage members to embrace change and recognize each other's efforts.
Tribalism reflects strong ethnic or cultural identities that separate members of one group from another, making them loyal to people like them and suspicious of outsiders, which undermines efforts to forge common cause across groups.
Organizational structures that allow divisions and departments to own their turf and people with long tenure to take root creates the same hardened group distinctions as Congressional redistricting to produce homogeneous voting blocs - all of which makes it easier to resist compromise, let alone collaboration.
The way innovating companies are designed leaves ambiguities, overlaps, decision conflicts or decision vacuums in some parts of the organisation. People rail at this, curse it-and invent innovative ways to overcome it.
The boomers' biggest impact will be on eliminating the term 'retirement' and inventing a new stage of life... the new career arc.
The middle of every successful project looks like a disaster.
I've found that small wins, small projects, small differences often make huge differences.
I wanted to go to Washington to bring people together who had never been together before. I wanted to break down the barriers between races.
There are still thousands of people dying every year in Laos, mostly children and farmers, from unexploded anti-personnel ordnance that the U.S. simply saturated much of the land with, especially in the Plain of Jars. There actually is a British engineering team trying to remove some of these things, which are much worse than land mines.
When I was 15, I changed my name legally. I think it was largely due to my struggle about being gay. Everything just didn't fit, and I was trying to find things I could identify myself with, and it started with my name.
If you want to change the future, you must change what you're doing in the present.
Nothing that is can pause or stay; / The moon will wax, the moon will wane, / The mist and cloud will turn to rain, / The rain to mist and cloud again, / Tomorrow be today.
There is no fundamental social change by being simply of individual and interpersonal actions. You have to have organizations and institutions that make a fundamental difference.
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