Monday, March 23, 2009

Changes.


Our Psychologists and Politicians alike are puzzled by the seemingly irrational resistance to change exhibited to certain individuals and groups. The corporation head who wants to re-organize a department, the educator who wants to introduce a new teaching method, the mayor who wants to achieve peaceful integration of the races in the city - all, at one time or another, face this blind resistance. Yet we little know about its sources. By the same token, why do some men hunger, even rage for change, doing all in their power to create it, while others flee from it?


I not only found no ready answers to such questions, but discovered that we lack an adequate theory of adaptation, without which it is extremely unlikely that we will ever find the answers.


It also calls attention to an important, though often over-looked, distinction. Almost invariably, research into the effects of change concentrate on the destinations towards which the journey carries us, rather than the speed of the journey. To try to show that the rate of change has implications quite apart from, and sometimes more important than, the directions of change. No attempt to understand adaptivity can succeed until this fact is grasped. Any attempt to define the 'content' of change must include the consequences of pace itself as part of that content.

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