Quotes About Change

You know the adage "People resist change." It is not really true. People are not stupid. People love change when they know it is a good thing. No one gives back a winning lottery ticket. What people resist is not change per se, but loss. When change involves real or potential loss, people hold on to what they have and resist the change.

Your goal should be to keep the temperature within what we call the productive zone of disequilibrium (PZD): enough heat generated by your intervention to gain attention, engagement, and forward motion, but not so much that the organization (or your part of it) explodes.

The most common leadership failure stems from trying to apply technical solutions to adaptive challenges.

To sustain momentum through a period of difficult change, you have to find ways to remind people of the orienting value—the positive vision—that makes the current angst worthwhile.

Win-win solutions are ideal but not common with strategic choices. When we hear someone talk "win-wins," we wonder if anything really lasting is going to change.

Contemporary capitalism brings everything we do, touch, and are, increasingly under the imperative for profit, causing incessant change with little regard for human and environmental consequences.

Old age is a lot of crossed off names in an address book.

In Libya, you are made aware the whole time of the abandonment of things, the material leftovers of receding cultures

The dogmas of the quiet past,76 are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new,77 so we must think anew, and act anew.

Must colour change?

In some of these cases, I found that I could not defend my beliefs adequately and needed to change my opinion. In others, I was able to reaffirm my convictions with real confidence. The point is that reexamining these basic beliefs was painful, sometimes agonizingly so. It was not a purely intellectual effort, but involved some of my deepest emotions. It challenged my sense of myself, since I had closely identified some of these beliefs with who I was and what I stood for.

What people resist is not change per se, but loss.

Yesterday's adaptations are today's routines.

The improvisational ability to lead adaptively relies on responding to the present situation rather than importing the past into the present and laying it on the current situation like an imperfect template.

The other form of genuine connection is more general, and best explained by reversing the traditional metaphor of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. During the past fifty years, as described, a lot of babies have been removed from the bathwater of primeval seasonal festivity, in the shape of customs which proved to be a lot less old than had previously been supposed.

As a living entity, the progressives reasoned, government had to evolve and adapt in response to changing circumstances.

While in 2011 only 30 percent of American evangelicals believed "an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life," by October 2016 the number was 70 percent.

Persons sin by participating in evil systems when they understand, at least to some degree, that the system displeases God but fail to act responsibly to change things.

As the church demonstrates new possibilities for community grounded in Jesus's teaching, the church models a new reality that historically has profoundly shaped surrounding society.46 Perhaps it is not an overstatement to say that "only a continuing community dedicated to a deviant value system can change the world.

Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

America's view of apartheid is simple and straightforward We believe it is wrong. We condemn it. And we are united in hoping for the day when apartheid will be no more.

The distance between the present system and our proposal is like comparing the distance between a Model T and the space shuttle. And I should know I've seen both.

We have the means to change the laws we find unjust or onerous. We cannot, as citizens, pick and choose the laws we will or will not obey. (On dismissing 12,000 striking air traffic controllers)

You know, it was only a generation ago that actors couldn't be buried in the churchyard.