Why people find it so difficult to accept change without realizing that the change would make their lives much easier?
As software guys, any experiences?
Resistance to Change?
1–8 of 8 posts
Re: Resistance to Change?
#2Change often comes with movement and with people having to step out of their comfort zone at least once. And generally people dont like that.
Re: Resistance to Change?
#3It is pithy to say so.
Which change? Any change? Any way, any how?
This is one of those phenomena where everything is so clear afterwards. In real time conserving potential is the strategy for longevity and endurance.
Most change are circumstantial, adaptations to the relativistic nature of the subjective instance.
Worth while change is one which is self sustaining, where the cost of change is calculably long term efficient, as any change has overhead.
As a “software guy” I can’t tell you how often the new guy spouts off about the latest trend in development (as I’m sure I had once), where in reality it is better to wait for mature versions, developed community support, and established continuity in a niche before considering the investment of adaptation.
Re: Resistance to Change?
#4Software people tend to hyper-focus on the one change they are trying to bring to a specific area. This means we don't always look at the bigger picture of people's lives. We tend to think that improving one little process in their day will "make their lives better", when in realty they got 99 problems and our little fix ain't one of them. So sure, our little change in their lives is a better answer to that specific problem, but in the bigger picture it just is an annoyance and makes them burn their energy in a place that was already working fine for them.
Is your change better than the prior solution? Yeah, it most likely is. And if you are solving a problem that makes people feel pain in their lives for a large chunk of the day, they will welcome the change. But most changes don't work at that scale in their users' lives.
Re: Resistance to Change?
#5Any UI change will get complaints from the users, and you have to be very careful. People get the old way programmed into their workflow and it becomes second nature to them, and any changes messes with that flow.
Like I used to build and support software for a call center, and if we resized a button or changed the color of the text somewhere, we got complaints from the agents using the software.
It's kind of like driving your car for two years, and then you get into your car and the turn signal is suddenly in a different place and operates completely differently. Now your mental driving autopilot is going to get screwed up, it'll take time to adjust, and you may have preferred where it used to be anyway.
Now imagine fucking with thousands or millions of users that way every time you make a little change. People are going to hate you for it if you do it to them too often.
Re: Resistance to Change?
#6It's hard to predict all the ways in which change will affect someone. Serious negative consequences may not be apparent at first. Also, if change is instituted from the outside (by company management, government etc.), it's rightful to be suspicious if the people bringing in the change had your interest in mind.
In more concrete and software-related terms, bringing in new software to companies often means layoffs... The software is meant to replace at least some of the people.
Re: Resistance to Change?
#7What sort of change do you mean? Real world changes such as the cashless society and smartphones. There's a whole rant there but I guess you mean software changes. That is because we programmers usually regress software. "You can't do that anymore because we removed the feature to make it easier for us". Firefox and XUL. Firefox and the text encoding menu. Windows and any feature missing in newer versions. FFmpeg and its "-safe" option and protocol whitelists.
What change did you have in mind that you think would make someone's life easier but they refused to accept it?
Re: Resistance to Change?
#8I think humans prefer to live on autopilot. Life is easier when you are familiar with your surroundings, things are predictable and you have developed habits that work well enough.
When you introduce change, you force others to re-evaluate the new situation and to establish new habits. That requires active thinking, choices. Those take energy, and you feel more drained afterwards.
I believe that we optimize for stability and not change, because we aim to spend as little energy as possible on getting through our day.