Bewailing Change

You know, a great many of the issues we deal with involve change. Any time someone wants to mess with the status quo, even when the current situation is clearly untenable, there’s always a faction (often terribly noisy) that screams and hollers about the end of days that will result if we change the way we always do business and accuses those advocating changes as being alarmists.

Un-hunh.

Ironically, time and time again, when we do implement change, often out of long-overdo necessity, we find the actual effect to be so small as to all but go unnoticed if not an improvement in exactly those arenas the fear police insisted would be devastated by the change. Usually whatever costs would have been even cheaper if the changes had been implemented when first noticed.

I think about this often. I like change. I can’t think of anything more conducive to failure than stagnation, and history has many examples of the very mighty getting their butts handed to them because they were rotting from the inside out. Feel free to provide examples. I would, but, hey, I can’t do all the homework. (If you want me to, feel free to leave a question on my other blog.)

I’ve talked about this where I work, often argued vociferously for changes from the way “we’ve always done things” because something better already exists (first job). I’ve talked about this when advocating finally converting to SI units (IAASS paper I presented) and pointed to the industries that converted with an almost seamless simplicity and actual cost savings rather than loss. The costs that do exist usually do so because of all the pinheads who refuse to change because it’s too “expensive.”

It makes me wonder how many times we let the naysayers cry “Wolf!” before we stop listening to them.

People have reacted with horror and abject fear to all kinds of changes: computers, robotics, vaccines, rockets (I kid you not), having a female Justice in the Supreme Court, having a black man in the White House. So far, no great flood has risen up to smite us. Most of the technology we feared we now couldn’t do without. I remember the great fear when the word came to eradicate CFCs. Now, I’m sure it had an impact on the HVAC world, but none of them seem to have gone out of business and, what do you know, we didn’t have to eliminate air conditioning altogether as quite a few people prophesied.

So, when I read this on our allies who accept gay soldiers without fuss, I wasn’t surprised that it turned out to be a tempest in a teapot. They had the same fears about it as we’ve been citing, except, when they actually implemented it, turns out their soldiers were grownups and hardly blinked. But, we’re still saying our troops can’t handle it, that just because our allies did it, doesn’t mean we should. We’re much bigger and meaner a military (and the logic behind that is, what?). The point of the Allies’ success isn’t that we should be following, it’s that the only issue is the pinheads who fear it. The issue isn’t how big your army is, it’s how big the soldiers are.

And I think the pinheads are selling our soldiers and our people short.

Again.