Change is just more of the same

" Modern skulls still have a stone age mind " [1] " This Quality Assurance programme is a total waste of time. " " Why change the roster if it was working just fine before? " " If it isn't broken, why do you want to fix it? " " The bosses never tell us what's going on, but they expect us to follow them! " " Why can't they make up their minds about how they want to improve the standards in our academic department instead of changing things all the time? " " It's just another new Dean of the faculty who thinks he knows it all and wants to change things. " " Don't you remember the previous attempt by the Vice-Chancellor to change our university? It ended up in a total failure, didn't it? " " All this stuff about change management is an excuse for the consultants to make lots of money. " " The only way we are going to survive is if we destroy everything and then, like the proverbial phoenix, we rise from the ashes. " Type the word " change " into Google and you get 1.4 billion hits. " Change management " gets you 71.8 million hits, " coping with change " 2.6 million and " books on change " 302,000 hits. In short, change is BIG. Think of a change that you recently experienced. Did you like that change? Or were you unhappy with it? Did you take a long time to come to terms with it, or was it a breeze? Or did you forget about it for another time and place? Were you able to stop the change? In the end, does it really matter whether you liked it or not? After all, it has already happened. Change is all around us, and it is close to impossible to define because it can be seen from so many different perspectives. We find change disorienting as it fills us with an anxiety similar to the loss of something that had defined our lives. With an established routine, we don't have to think! And it is so easy to forget that thinking is really hard work, especially if everything needs to be thought out every day! It is akin to experiencing a " culture " shock where we experience the unease of a different culture with different customs, values, …