Change hype

I lately read a lot of blog posts about change - to be the change, life-long learning and hence changing, not to stick in the past and so on.

People feel stressed by all the new things they could and should learn, by new situations they have to get familiar with, by all the new products rising, opportunities they probably miss. In the end everybody feels stressed because time is going on so fast and they have to adapt. Everybody is a victim and nobody feels responsible and nobody feels himself cause and reason.

I often wonder how fast people decide to adapt new things without analyzing the benefit. And even more often a new thing is the trigger to take action and not a particular problem to solve. So people get used to things they didn't miss before. There is much written about people don't really like to change but I think they change a lot. I see it from words like "beta testers", "early adopters", "trend setters" and others - especially in email newsletters there are many words used that should create a good feeling because getting some really early and still secret information. People want to be cool or simple fear to be left behind if they do not get the newest things.

As working in IT I feel overwhelmed by all the technologies I get told to be so exiting new and I should learn. But people are often neither asking for the major benefits of migrating to a new product, service or way of living.

I am not against change - I already changed several times my mainly used programming language for instance. But I ask for benefits and costs of the change. It does not make sense to continuously being in change because the change/migration phase is not the peek of productivity. The arguments are:

• Migration to something new costs time and often also money.
  New products must be bought, people must be trained, ...
  
• New products or paths usually do not work very well at the beginning - there are usually some "patches" required after a first test period.
• New is not always better.
  Sad, but true - there are a lot of new things created that are not having improved quality. - Sometimes new things were just produced cheaper and hence do have less quality.
  

Change can be a good thing and I am not against change. But there must be clear benefits and the costs may not be exaggerated in relation. When something new has been adapted/implemented and it works well then it should be used a while to be profitable.

So analyze the real problem, the benefits and risks of possible solutions as well as their costs. As you do look at different sites, compare prices and qualities before buying a new car, why not also for your personal development?

To change or not to change - that is the question. You have to set the benefits, risks and costs in relation to each other.

As we are all part of the whole we must start slowing down the change speed if we want to reduce the stress of change requests and requirement. I good site to start slowing down is www.slowdownnow.org.

Related posts: Quickly change a habit, Hard exercise, You can learn fast. Decision planning, As it would be the last day, Direction over goals, Slowing down.