The Evolutionary Advantage of a Resistance to Change

I was just thinking about organisational change and pondering over how our natural tendency to change is to resist it, when this thought popped up: if resistance to change is so hardwired in our brains, it must serve some purpose — but what?

One of the premises of evolutionary theory is this: if something survives (be it an organism or perhaps even an idea), its survival can be attributed to certain traits or characteristics that help it survive. These traits or characteristics are developed/evolved over time: as those that have these traits survive, and those that don’t die, more and more of the population will have these traits, eventually becoming a “norm”.

Such as a natural tendency to resist change.

At least that’s the theory.

So, let’s make a provocative statement here (inspired by Edward de Bono’s po): Po, a resistance to change isn’t necessarily a bad thing, despite all the bad press it’s getting. In fact, it may be good.

I think that before we get all gung-ho about the next big thing and bashing old ways of doing things, we should think about why things are the way they are, especially if they have been that way for a long time.

Old ways of doing things are, generally speaking, antifragile. They’ve withstood the test of time and have a decent history of working. Good ideas tend to remain good ideas, and the longer they survive the better they tend to be; bad ideas, on the other hand, are discarded as soon as they’re found out (a caveat: those that do manage to survive for long, however, tend to be the most dangerous — bad things are made worse when they’re not known to be bad. Think insidious. Think CFCs.)

So if you have an old way of doing things, it may not be the best way, but it’s likely a way that generates decent results, enough for it to have lasted as long as it has. The moment a better way of doing things is found and tested to work, the old way is discarded. But until then, the old way is the best way.

If people weren’t resistant to change, on the other hand, good ideas wouldn’t have the time to spread. We’d be flitting from one idea to the next, discarding great ones and embracing bad ones in equal measure.

So a resistance to change isn’t all that bad. It’s the way things should be. The incumbent has earned its right on the throne, and the onus should always be on the challenger to prove its worth.

So it does worry me if people rush into new ways of doing things without having redundant systems in place, just in case. I mean, let’s not be too hasty in burning bridges.

If there’s going to be a process change, have the old process remain in place until the new process is proven stable. Depending on what the process is, a few iterations (or days, or months) is most certainly needed. Give it time to prove its antifragility.

When automobiles were first introduced, horse-drawn carriages didn’t disappear overnight. Concurrency. Then obsolescence.

Resist, consider, then change. Carefully.