TWO

We Prefer Stability

Homeostasis, from the Greek words for “same” and “steady,” refers to any process that living things use to actively maintain fairly stable conditions necessary for survival.

—Emeritus professor Kelvin Rodolfo

Though the word homeostasis was coined less than a hundred years ago, it describes a phenomenon as old as humanity.⁴ For as long as we’ve been around, homeostasis—a kind of dynamic stability—has been essential to our well-being. For example, if we get too hot, we have bodily mechanisms like sweating to cool us back to an optimal temperature. And if those don’t work, we’ve learned to apply external balancers: move into the shade, find cool water to pour over ourselves and/or drink. If we get too cold, we put on more covering. Too low on fuel, we get hungry, and we eat. Humans are programmed to stay within a set of physical parameters that keep us alive and healthy, and that we experience as “comfortable.”

Historically, sociological homeostasis has also served us well. Being able to create and maintain stable family groups and larger working groups—village, farm, or factory—made it more likely that those groups would be able, over time, to prosper and grow. Doing our work in the same ways, cultivating and eating the same foods, having the same expectations of each other that had been shown to work well for many years, all of this was a good hedge against inevitable external disruption—crop failure, disease, invasion. As soon as the unusual circumstance was past, we learned to go back to “normal” as quickly as possible. In short: throughout the vast majority of human history, significant change was almost invariably a threat to our well-being and needed to be managed or removed immediately in order to return to homeostasis, the status quo.

This may sound like ancient history, but that preference for the status quo is very much with us today. Most modern-day “conservative” political movements, for instance, are primarily in favor of returning to what their adherents see as a healthier, safer homeostasis of the past: societal rules and expectations that “worked well” (at least for some people) for many years, and to which we should, adherents believe, return. As a species and as individuals, we have been programmed for many thousands of years to believe that in order to survive, we have to define “normal” and then stay as close to that definition as we possibly can. This bias toward sameness and stability has in fact always been a powerful restraining influence on change. During the past few hundred years, as advances in communication and technology have been accelerating factors, our deeply wired-in preference for homeostasis has served as a consistent brake on that acceleration.

For example, in the mid-seventeenth century, scientists began to be able to see microorganisms under newly developed microscopes and began to posit these tiny creatures as a source of infection and disease. Over the next two hundred years, more and more scientific evidence supported this new “germ theory.”⁵ In the mid-nineteenth century, a doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis conducted an experiment. He made doctors wash their hands with chlorinated lime water before examining women giving birth. Over one year Semmelweis documented a sudden and dramatic reduction in the mortality rate of women attended in childbirth by these doctors—from 18 percent to 2.2 percent.⁶ But it was another fifty years before most doctors were regularly washing their hands between patients. Why? Because it was different from what they’d always done and what they assumed was best; it wasn’t “normal.” It seems they were uncomfortable accepting this new idea that implied that they—takers of the Hippocratic oath, those most knowledgeable about illnesses and their treatment—were actually making their patients sick, or even killing them.

If this single, seemingly simple change based on an ever-increasing body of data generated ongoing, entrenched negativity or dismissal for hundreds of years, it’s no wonder this age of continuous change makes us anxious! At work, for instance, just when we’ve figured out what’s “normal”—how things work, who is important, what the company does and why—it all shifts out from under us. Suddenly we’re reporting to someone new, the group next to us has been outsourced, our core work processes have changed, and the department goals have altered dramatically. And then, just as we’re starting to figure out this new normal, to accept it as the way things are and take a breath—everything changes again. It’s exhausting. It’s the way life is now, and it’s just going to keep speeding up.

So here we are with this deeply wired-in, ancient drive toward homeostasis. Instead of serving us almost all the time, as it has for millennia, this drive now only serves us some of the time. It serves us physiologically: it’s still important to keep our bodies within certain parameters of weight, temperature, and hydration to stay healthy and vital. The drive toward homeostasis often serves us interpersonally, too: it’s still healthy and important—maybe more than ever—to create and maintain strong, stable human bonds. But organizationally (and I would argue politically, scientifically, psychologically, and economically), we are going to have to let go of our age-old focus on keeping things the same and instead learn to feel comfortable with and to find a new kind of dynamic stability in a state of ongoing change. In order to survive and thrive today and tomorrow and next year, we need to rewire ourselves and our organizations. We need to create alternatives to our time-tested reliance on stability and the known—to build new ways of thinking and operating that will allow us to accept and even embrace continuous, multilevel change.

Dan is about to begin the weekly meeting of Moment Jewelry’s senior team. Jade is already seated at the conference table in his office, talking with Rajiv, their newish CTO. The four GMs are there, too: James is telling a funny story to Amber and Damian, while Carolyn is checking something on her phone. Steven, the CFO, and Gina, head of Human Resources, come in talking about the new bonus program they’ve recently put in place. They greet Dan and take their seats, still chatting. Dan shuts the door and sits down, waiting for the conversation to drift away before he starts the meeting.

“Hi, all,” he says. “Before we dig in to our regular agenda—I know Steven wants to go over the finalized Black Friday figures, and Gina mentioned she’d like to let you know how the insurance switch is going—I wanted to give Jade a chance to talk about some of the big changes she’d like us to consider making.” Dan looks around the table and sees a variety of expressions, from concerned to surprised to puzzled. He nods to Jade.

“OK,” she says. “Now, before I start, I know I can be a little extreme at times.” She smiles ruefully at Dan, and he smiles back. “So, take this all in the spirit of—I love this company. My dad and my aunt and all of us have built a really good thing here, and I want it to continue to succeed and grow until my kids are working here . . . or telling me that’s the last thing they want to do.” Everybody smiles or chuckles, and a little of the tension eases.

“But,” Jade says, raising a finger, “I’m convinced we’re going to have to make some major changes over the next year or so—and then when we’re done making them, there will be more changes to make. Our industry isn’t what it was thirty years ago—and who knows what it will be like ten years from now? We’ve created a really solid, stable company—it’s a great environment for our staff and our longtime customers. I know that; I see it. But, if we want to succeed for another thirty years, we’re going to have to get much better at being nimble—at seeing what customers want and changing to meet those needs. It’s a whole different way of thinking, and I’m not even sure what it will require of us.”

Jade looks at Dan almost apologetically, and suddenly he feels uneasy. He opens his mouth, perhaps to soften what she’s about to say, to reassure everyone or make a joke.

Before he can speak, Jade begins again. “What I do know, though, is that we can’t continue the way we’re going. It won’t work. I think we’re mostly hoping that the good stuff we’ve built will just carry us through. But it won’t. Even with all the positive things about Moment, if we don’t make some really fundamental changes in the company and how we operate it—and soon—we may not even be here in another few years, let alone thirty.”

There’s a long moment of shocked silence, and then everyone starts talking at once.