Change

I have been to a number of presentations about the fear of change, embracing change and dealing with change. Personally, I have never been terribly upset by change, probably because change combats my real problem: a fear of boredom. Further, I see no reason to discuss whether change is good or bad; it can be both. The fact is that change is inevitable. It is the rate of change that deserves our attention and its increase that we ought to discuss.

I spent most of the holiday trying to resolve our cell phone/internet/TV issues. TV has only two options: antenna or satellite. For years, every time the wind blew, I had to get out on the roof with a big stick to move the antenna and get our three channels back. My wife forced the change to satellite before my first trip overseas on the grounds that she was neither going to go climbing out on the roof nor be stuck looking after four kids without TV access. Now, the biggest issue is cutting back the clematis from the dish!

Internet options are not so simple. These have morphed four times in the last six years. We started out with dial-up since that was all that was available in our rural area. I remember talking to a Telus technician at a conference in those days about future improvements. I was told that there really wasn’t anything coming down the pike any time soon. Thankfully, he was wrong! Satellite download with modem upload came first, then satellite up and down, then radio modems, and now WiMax from Cremona. Go figure! And just recently I received a flyer from our local gas co-op advertising that they will start providing WiMax service very soon, as well. Meanwhile, there is still a plan afoot to plow fiber to all county residences, but this plan has been in the works for many years now, and I suspect I will never see it at my doorstep. More to the point, though I would have been thrilled to tears to have seen this within a year or two of the plans’ conception, now I am not sure I need fiber.

Cell phones? Well that is a whole other story! I wrestled with issues of analog, three different digital protocols, four different frequencies and three different data protocols--not to mention the questions of locked versus unlocked and plan versus pay-as-you-go! And those are only the changes that I have personally dealt with in the last six years. I was thrilled last year to know for sure that I could text from any country in which I landed. Imagine my surprise to be in a tent in the middle of the Masai Mara trying to size a solar water pump when Charles pulls out his laptop and connects to the internet! Here I am, thrilled that I finally get to cut my land line, only to realize that many countries have never bothered to use them in the first place. They simply skipped right over the hardwired infrastructure!

It recently occurred to me that we think of change as an event rather than as the continuum it actually is. Too often I hear, “We are moving forward with this change.” This change? No wonder some people get upset with technologies: they don’t even get comfortable with something new when someone begins telling them they need to think about something else. We need to be comfortable with change, not just the specific changes. It does not matter what was just installed or newly implemented; there is a good chance that it will be out-of-date long before you are ever comfortable with it.

Making a change does not keep you current. Changing at the rate of change merely holds your position. You must change faster than the rate of change to catch up. If you are not changing at least at the rate of change, you are losing ground. Merely changing does not mean you are moving forward; it might just mean you are moving backwards less quickly.

"when the rate of change inside an organization

is slower than the rate of change outside,

the end is in sight."

Jack Welch, CEO of GE