“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” – John F. Kennedy
Everyone knows change is hard. And it’s not only hard to change, sometimes it’s hard to even wrap our minds around what change to make. We’re bombarded with ideas about things we could change in our lives and our businesses. How do we choose?
To make it even more difficult, the world around us is constantly changing. People change, technologies change, societies change – the list goes on and on. Most of those “the world around us” changes also happen to be completely out of our control, which makes it even more stressful.
The unfortunate response of too many leaders is to try and hold on to the past. The year is 2025, but on an almost daily basis I encounter leaders who are trying to make sure their business runs just like it did in 2015, or 2005, or 1987, etc. (you get the idea). The fear of change, or the discomfort that might come with change, convinces people that some time in the past was the “good old days”, and if we just try hard enough we can keep those days, or bring them back.
That is, of course, completely false. Not only are those days not coming back, but they weren’t even the good old days. Those days had challenges and opportunities and barriers and successes, just like these days do. We’re just so wired to be anti-change that we forget that and think that if we can just stop change, or undo it, then we’ll be happy.
The world has been changing since the beginning of time, and it will continue to do so. In all of human history, no one has been able to stop that, and no one ever will. Pendulums swing back and forth, but over time, change will continue. If we’re going to succeed on this planet, we have to not only be OK with that, we have to embrace it.
That doesn’t mean all changes are wonderful. Part of your job as a leader is to figure out what change to lean into and what change to minimize. That isn’t easy, and sometimes you’ll make the wrong choice.
Even so, the solution isn’t to stop choosing change. It’s to pick yourself up and try again. The only way you really fail is if you stop changing, stop looking for change, stop looking for ways to improve.
Always remember that when you say, “I want things to be better than they are”, what you’re saying is that you want them to change. You can’t make things better by keeping them the way they are, or the way you think they were 10 or 20 or 50 years ago. Embrace the change that moves you forward, and open the door to the future.
