We all seem to be living through a time of rapid change.
Part of these feelings of experiencing rapid change comes, no doubt, from careful attention to news media, alerts we receive on our mobile phone, the ubiquitous “Breaking News” moniker on every screen. We now learn of a bus accident that killed three people in a remote rural area of a country far away from us, complete with pictures, within hours of the event. With such connectedness, there is a lot to cover, and we can literally see it all with a few clicks on a mobile phone. So, it seems that events are occurring faster and faster because we can follow so many events simultaneously.
Immediately after the 9/11 events, I mounted a repeated survey of a national sample of adults, containing a battery of self-report psychological health measures. We tracked such self-reported well-being over time as the days and weeks passed. A finding I will always remember is that those respondents who kept close attention to the media stories of the events after the attack, suffered from reduced well-being for a much longer period of time, relative to those who paid less attention to such media. Such attention seemed to keep the psychological wounds fresher for longer periods of time. Based on this finding, one wonders how much of a sense of living in a moment of rapid change is a function of how much attention is paid to very short cycled new media.
These thoughts may also apply to anyone in a work organization or some institution that also is undergoing change. For example, US universities are facing threats to Federal government financial support and increasing costs from demands for new academic programs, facilities, and student services. Just as economic inequality is a concern among US households, inequality in financial resources among elite private universities, state universities, and small liberal arts colleges is inducing change in the eco-system of US higher education. Further, the coming cohorts of students will come from life experiences very different from those of the last two decades. To optimally serve those students, changes in US universities must occur.
Similarly, in private sector organizations, externally influenced changes abound. Retail stores of a “brick and mortar” type and small businesses are being rapidly affected by internet-based consumption. Shopping malls, once thriving, are filled with empty storefronts. Some close completely. Department stores, offering large inventories of diverse products, are most vulnerable. Generational effects in consumer behavior seem large; younger shoppers claim never to visit stores except virtually. The manufacturers to the retail sector, once a stable industry, are undergoing real change.
With such rapid changes externally induced on organizations, one wonders how it affects the taste for voluntary change within the organizations. In this context, are proposals for change within organizations affected by the general feeling that the rate of change in the larger society is rapid, out of one’s control, and filled with fearful consequences? Do more and more people tend to seek stability in their social worlds (which they partially control) and in their work organizations, in reaction to the feeling of overwhelming rapid change in the larger world? Alternatively, do the feelings of unrelenting change in the external world spur a sense of need for innovation in other aspects of their lives?
Interesting. In my role at SCS, most of my work is about change — designing it, implementing it, supporting other units that need it. In many discussions of change, change management, etc, there seems to be the unspoken assumption that stability is the norm. Yet stability is just a human idea: we naturally expect the system we first encountered to be the same on subsequent encounters, and we are surprised when we discover the system has changed. Careful observation of the natural world shows us that stability is not the norm — in nature, change is constant, on many different scales of time and space. In reading through some sustainability literature I recently came across the idea of “dynamic stability” — stability at larger scales that are made possible by cycles of change at smaller scales. For example, a forest may exist in “stability” for 5000 years because it’s constituent parts go through decades-long cycles of succession from one community of “pioneer” species, to mid-stage communities of species that can only grow in the shade/context of the pioneer species, to later-stage species that can only grow out of the previous stage. And of course, at the most fundamental levels of the universe, we know that change is such an inherent property that we can only define quantum particles in terms of probability.
Meanwhile, at human-scale and organization-scale, a key reason for change is to fix dysfunctional systems. There are a great many of these in Higher Education, but the focus of our energies tends to stray toward glossy, faddish change activities and away from the mundane but critically-important functional-improvement activities, perhaps for the emotional reasons identified in your post. Much of the dysfunction in systems comes from the assumption that a system must be permanently stable. In the IT world, trends in agile development have emerged to deal with the fact that stability is an illusion — requirements and operating conditions will always change, and so small, incremental improvements delivered on a on-going basis in response to careful observation have become the norm for software development (look at the Georgetown Google apps for an example — they change incrementally almost monthly if not weekly). Not unlike the dynamic stability that occurs in the natural world.
Perhaps dynamic stability is a concept we can embrace within Higher Education, as a way to incorporate smaller cycles of much-needed change for the purposes of ensuring large-scale, long-term stability? Perhaps, if we embrace change as the norm, rather than stability, we can make better, intentional, choices about the changes we create, so that we can avoid the dysfunction that comes from attempting to enforce stability, avoid making choices driven by “feelings of unrelenting change in the external world”, and avoid simply reacting to some external event, tp instead create our own change that fully aware of the long-term importance and impact on the larger-scale systems?
Very interesting and thoughtful post, thank you.
Yes. I think you hit the nail on the head.
One suggestion, “alternatively” in the last could be premature, “yes yes and yes” seems common among many GU faculty, 1+2 vs 3 might not be mutually exclusive.
Cheers
Paul
This reminds me of a sociology professor who taught one thing that I remembered for life. He talked of the concept of “cultural lag”. Basically it said that technology would explode and with it change would be so fast with jobs changing, people moving away from extended families etc . The sociological concept of cultural lag predicted that in the future the culture would not be able to catch up with the rapid explosion of technology. This would cause tremendous stress on systems and individuals and families. I always remember that one concept and have found his prediction to be very true. The question is how do we adapt as our culture has not caught up with massive change in the speed and technological advances .
That was in a1965