Adaptation is the rule of human existence, not the exception.

Stop Using the Excuse “Organizational Change Is Hard”
by Nick Tasler JULY 19, 2017

During nearly every discussion about organizational change, someone makes the obvious assertion that “change is hard.” On the surface, this is true: change requires effort. But the problem with this attitude, which permeates all levels of our organizations, is that it equates “hard” with “failure,” and, by doing so, it hobbles our change initiatives, which have higher success rates than we lead ourselves to believe.

Our biases toward failure is wired into our brains. In a recently published series of studies, University of Chicago researchers Ed O’Brien and Nadav Klein found that we assume that failure is a more likely outcome than success, and, as a result, we wrongly treat successful outcomes as flukes and bad results as irrefutable proof that change is difficult.

For example, when participants in one of the studies were presented with a season’s worth of statistics for a star athlete who had logged worse numbers than usual, the participants were quick to conclude that the player’s career had begun an irreversible downward spiral. But when presented with the stats of a historically average player who had a breakout season, the same people concluded that this boost in performance was nothing but a fluke.

The researchers found the same negatively-biased evaluations in all sorts of situations: when pessimistic people try to become more positive, when angry bosses try to cut back on vein-popping outbursts, when B students try to become A students, when candy-cravers try to become lettuce-lovers, and when pundits are deciding whether the economy is primed for a rebound or a recession.

read more https://hbr.org/2017/07/stop-using-the-excuse-organizational-change-is-hard?utm_campaign=hbr&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social