6. On the Tension Between Stasis and Innovation

You now know why some of your colleagues do not immediately display a deep sense of company loyalty. You know why some of them don’t come into their professional lives with a killer work ethic. You know why some of them have erroneous expectations about how quickly their careers will advance and about how hard they’ll need to work in order to maintain their professional edge. You know why some of them have started to work less vigorously than they did in the past. And, most importantly, you know how to address all of these issues—how to instill loyalty in everyone around you, how to encourage your Younger or less-experienced colleagues to work hard and how to remind your Older or more-experienced colleagues that they shouldn’t stop working hard. At this point, the vast majority of your generational issues in the workplace could probably be resolved.¹

¹ Presuming, of course, that your colleagues are actually willing to listen to you. That’s a big if since you probably wouldn’t have any generational issues in the first place if everyone were happy to listen to the ideas and advice of people 20 years older or younger than they are. But fear not! You’ll find solutions to that problem in Chapters 9–10. Hurray for Chapters 9–10!

In fact, there’s really only one major area of generational tension left, and that is the nature and pace of change. Typically, Young People expect changes to happen more often and more quickly than Old People do. If you’re experiencing generational tensions related to changing elements of your business, then it’s almost certainly because some of your Older colleagues don’t see the point in changing anything, while some of your Younger colleagues seem determined to change everything. Old People tend to say, “Love it or leave it,” while Young People tend to say, “Love it or change it.” Our differing approaches to change are one of the foundational causes of generational issues. When we disagree with someone about how much or how quickly to change something, we immediately move farther away from that person on the Us/Them spectrum.

You’ll notice that these two stories are very similar to the ones at the beginning of Chapter 5. In both chapters, an Old Person is complaining about a Young Person’s chronic impatience and unwillingness to learn the ropes before voicing unreasonable expectations; and in both cases, a Young Person is complaining about Old People’s stubborn refusal to push out their comfort zones. In a way it makes sense that these two issues would be related because the very nature of career advancement involves a continual change from beginner to expert.

We’re going to divide the subject of change management into two parts. Chapter 7 will deal more specifically with how to discuss changes to your business when they become inevitable and how to integrate those changes in a way that will maximize consensus and minimize dissent, regardless of your people’s age or experience level.

In this chapter, however, we’re going to discuss why different generations tend to have different attitudes toward change and innovation in the first place. Why is it that so many of your Older colleagues seem to be perfectly content to keep doing things the way they’ve always done them? And why is it that so many of your Younger colleagues seem to be constantly agitating for more and more innovation when it doesn’t always seem to be necessary?

We’ll find out shortly. But first, I think it’s time for another quiz.

1. If you would like to propose to a woman, which of the following should you probably buy her as a symbol of your eternal love and devotion?

A. A diamond ring

B. A Shetland pony

C. An arc welder

D. Paint

2. If you would like the undivided attention of one of your customers, which of the following is the best way to get it?

A. Call the customer.

B. Send the customer a text.

C. Send the customer an email message.

D. Send the customer a message through social media.

As with the quiz in Chapter 3, you are free to answer however you wish. And there are technically no wrong answers. It’s possible that you married a welder’s daughter, or maybe you’re the kind of woman who has always wanted to sculpt giant steel lawn ornaments, in which case the arc welder probably sounds like a great idea. Paint is always nice. And personally, I think half of the married women in the world would have said yes to their husbands if those men had proposed with a pony. If you happen to be thinking about proposing to someone in the near future, keep it in mind. Walk up to the woman of your dreams with a Shetland pony in tow and say, “He’ll be yours if you’ll be mine.” Women love ponies; I’ve known that since I was a kid. It very well might work.

But of course I already know how you answered Question 1 because everyone answers it the same. Thousands of years have trained us to know that the diamond ring is the symbol of an engagement. When you buy a diamond ring and get down on one knee, you’re not being original. You’re not being innovative. You’re not doing something completely unexpected. You’re not going against the grain or blazing a new trail or whatever maverick-y metaphor you’re using right now. You’re following a well-established tradition, and you’re doing it because you know that it works.

The same is true for Question 2, for which you almost certainly answered A as well. Calling someone on the phone isn’t a novel solution. When you make a phone call, you’re not taking advantage of a disruptive technology or changing an established paradigm in favor of something newer and better. You’re doing what people have been doing for the past 100 years, and you’re doing it because out of all the options I gave you, calling someone on the phone is the only one that might earn you their undivided attention. You might not always choose to make a phone call; after all, sending a text or an email is certainly an easier and less time-consuming way to touch base with someone, and sometimes that’s all you’re trying to do. But if you want to make sure they’re paying attention to you and nobody else, texts and emails simply can’t beat a good, old-fashioned phone call.

What’s the point of this quiz? Well, if you happen to be a Young Person, these two questions illustrate the most critical piece of information you need to understand in order to appreciate why your Older or more-experienced colleagues are occasionally resistant to innovation in general and your suggestions in particular. In fact, resistant isn’t even the right word to be using because they’re not actually resisting anything. A lot of times they simply don’t see the purpose of changing the way they’re doing things.

Why? Because the way they’ve always done things them has generally worked.

This is actually so important that it bears repeating, and in larger type!

The reason many Older or more-experienced people like doing things the way they’ve always done them is that the way they’ve always done them has generally worked.

Shocking as this may be, your Older or more-experienced colleagues actually do know what they’re doing. They know what they’re doing so well, in fact, that they were able to create a company profitable and sustainable enough to need to hire Young People like you in order to keep things going. If your team or department or company is currently successful, then that success is the result of current practices and processes. I realize this might be a difficult pill to swallow, especially if you’re of the mindset that certain changes need to occur soon in order for you to stay competitive. It’s very possible that you’re correct, and we address those concerns in a few pages.

But for now, it’s essential to understand that whatever practices and processes your company is currently doing are the best and most highly evolved practices and processes that anyone who has ever worked there has ever been able to come up with. It’s not simply that whatever you’re doing right now works; it’s that it works better than anything else that has ever been tried. That doesn’t mean those practices and processes can’t be improved, and we talk about that shortly. But it does mean that they have been successful up to this point.

In fact, look at the top 10 companies in the Fortune 500 for 2014: Wal-Mart, Exxon, Chevron, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Phillips 66, General Motors, Ford Motor, General Electric, and Valero Energy. None of these companies achieved its market dominance because of its vibrant social media presence. Many of them are selling substantially the same products and services they were selling a decade ago. With the exception of Apple, none of them generates the majority of its income by bringing disruptive products to the consumer market. By and large, these are not the companies whose flashy CEOs and sexy gadgets monopolize the attention of business columnists and tech bloggers. Some of their employees still use cathode-ray monitors and dot-matrix printers, just like cavepeople used to. And yet every one of these companies is wildly successful. I’m not suggesting that Wal-Mart or Exxon or any of the others don’t care about innovation; they absolutely do. But they certainly don’t care about every innovation or about innovation for its own sake.

If you want to see a concrete example of a successful company that has absolutely no interest in innovation for innovation’s sake, look no further than the Berkshire Hathaway homepage (www.berkshirehathaway.com). It is, without a doubt, the crappiest homepage I have ever seen. It’s conceivable that Warren Buffett designed it on a napkin while he was bored on a conference call. In fact, it’s possible that the Berkshire Hathaway homepage actually predates the Internet because there’s absolutely no way this page has been updated since 1843. The Berkshire Hathaway homepage is the technological equivalent of a giant, steaming turd. That’s how bad it is. And if I ever meet Warren Buffett in person, I’ll say the same to his face.

And if I ever do have the opportunity to speak at the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders’ meeting in Omaha and say what I’ve just written while Warren Buffett is in attendance, here’s how I imagine he might reply.

Thanks for your comments, Jeff. I appreciate your efforts to help us improve our branding and the user experience for our online customers. Except wait—oh, that’s right, we’re not a consumer company, and we have never been. We don’t get business because some giant conglomerate spent a few minutes browsing through our website. So ultimately, the quality of our homepage doesn’t really matter. Besides, I think we’ve done a pretty good job of branding ourselves, and I’m worth $50 billion. So thanks for your thoughts, and go away.

Again, I’m not suggesting that Warren Buffett is disinterested in innovation. Obviously, he’s always looking for new, interesting, innovative ways to make money. Exxon and Chevron are always looking for new and innovative ways to find oil. Ford and General Motors are always developing new engines and car designs. Wal-Mart and Apple are always experimenting with their store layouts and product placement in order to increase sales. At every point in time for every business, the drive to innovate is paramount, and the most successful companies are the ones that do it better than their competitors.

So while Young People have a tendency to criticize their Older colleagues for being unwilling to innovate, that complaint isn’t very valid. Everyone, regardless of age or experience, appreciates the need to innovate. The question is rarely whether to innovate. Far more commonly, the question is how to innovate. The only people you work with who don’t appreciate the necessity of innovation are people who don’t feel like putting in the energy that will be required of them to learn whatever new skills innovations will demand. This happens among Young People and Old People alike—the lazy new employees and the retired-in-all-but-name veterans—and in Chapter 5 we already discussed what you should do with those people.

However, while every motivated professional understands the importance of innovation, Older People have a much deeper appreciation of the value of existing practices and processes, if for no other reason than that they’ve been around long enough to see the benefits of those systems.² If you’re a Young Person, it’s important for you to understand that your Older or more-experienced colleagues don’t have a problem with new ideas. They’ve been incorporating new ideas into their working model for their entire careers. What they do have a problem with is any implication that their current practices and processes aren’t successful when the reality of your business says otherwise. If your business is doing well, then it is precisely because of all those old, boring, unoriginal, stodgy, pedestrian things your colleagues have been doing for the past few years.

² They’ve also been around long enough to see some of the deficiencies of those systems, which is why the call for innovation comes as often from them as it does from your Younger or less-experienced colleagues.

You’ve almost certainly heard a colleague complain about a proposed change with the change-averse mantra of the resistant Luddite: “That’s not how we’ve always done things.” But if you unpack that statement, you’ll find that in many cases, the person uttering those words isn’t afraid of change. He’s not necessarily saying, “That’s not how we’ve always done things, so I refuse to consider doing them differently.” A lot of times he’s saying, “That’s not how we’ve always done things, and I haven’t noticed any major problems, so why am I being asked to change something that seems to be working just fine?” Like everyone, this person wants to know why he’s being asked to consider a new idea. If you can’t provide a compelling argument for the need to innovate, then it’s very possible that the “innovation” you’re touting isn’t as critical or promising as you’d like it to be.

In fact, because “that’s not how we’ve always done things” is just as often uttered out of confusion as it is out of stubborn and irrational recalcitrance, the only time you shouldn’t pay it any attention is when the practice or process in question is obviously failing. If your department or company is floundering or in imminent danger of dissolution, then absolutely nothing should be sacred. In this kind of crisis, a complete overhaul might be your only chance to avoid a total collapse. Indeed, this is exactly the kind of behavior we see when new executives take over struggling companies—for example, Yahoo!’s Marissa Mayer changing flex-time policies for employees or BlackBerry’s John Chen suggesting that BlackBerry might soon transition out of the phone-making business altogether in order to focus on software and other managed services. When it’s an issue of survival, the consideration normally reserved for “business as usual” goes right out the window.

However, we’re usually not talking about life-or-death scenarios; more commonly we’re talking about isolated initiatives that may or may not be improvements to the way you’re currently doing things. The only way to find out if your new marketing strategy or factory floor layout actually makes things better is to get it implemented, and the only way that’s going to happen is if you can get buy-in from the other people you work with. If you’re positioning your ideas as a cure-all for your company’s backward approach to its logistics support or CRM strategy or whatever the issue happens to be, you’ll probably experience significant pushback from your more-experienced colleagues because they’ll feel that you don’t value what they’ve accomplished so far; this is the natural reaction all of us have when we feel as though our contributions aren’t being valued. If, however, you frame your innovative solution as an improvement to your currently successful practices, you’ll be far more likely to get the support you need to see your innovation through.

Fundamentally, your Older or more-experienced colleagues are asking for respect—not only for themselves personally, which we discussed in Chapter 5, but also for the systems and strategies they’ve spent their professional lives developing and executing. They value innovation, but they also see no reason to summarily throw out the baby with the bathwater.³

³ And since we’re on the subject, just don’t throw babies at all. People don’t like it, and I’m pretty sure it’s illegal. So don’t throw babies. That’s a big takeaway from this book.

⁴ You’ve also conveniently forgotten (like all of us tend to) that you railed against the status quo when you were young just as much as today’s Young People do. But I see no need to bring that up.

And yet I’m certain you’re at least subconsciously aware that the earlier use of the phrase “business as usual” was a convenient and completely inaccurate way to describe business of any kind. All of us are constantly incorporating changes into our businesses all the time. I’d bet everything I have—and I have a lot of things that I’m fond of and don’t want to give you—that you’re not doing business in the same way as you were two years ago. You’re using new technologies or operating under new budgets; you’re dealing with new regulations and different customer demands; you’ve hired some new people and watched some old friends retire; and if none of that is true, you have spent the past two years quietly evolving your relationships with the colleagues, customers, and vendors that allow your business to survive and thrive. You already know this. You’re constantly aware of the fact that things are always changing and that you’re always being forced to adapt to those changes.

So if it’s true that we’re all always incorporating changes into our existing working model—and it is true—then why does it seem like today’s Young People are so much more impatient for change than their Older colleagues?

There are three reasons for it. The first is simple enough to understand and easy enough to forget if you’re no longer at the beginning of your career: Advocating for change is one of the most common tools Young People use to demonstrate their own intelligence and earn the respect of their Older or more-experienced peers. As we mature, all of us yearn to be taken seriously by our elders, and one of the best weapons we have at our disposal is to offer up ideas, solutions, strategies, and philosophies that cause our elders to pause, consider, and ultimately realize that we deserve their time and attention. This is a function of age, pure and simple, and it has been going on throughout recorded history and will continue for as long as human beings exist.

So on the one hand, Young People agitate for change because that’s one of the ways Young People throughout history have always tried to be heard. Second—and more immediately relevant to your particular circumstances—the world is changing faster now than it used to. You’ve heard this before, probably so many times by now that your eyes are starting to roll back into your head. By itself it’s a useless comment, the kind of bland throwaway sentence people sometimes use to half-heartedly justify their desire to do something different. It’s said so often that it’s easy to wonder if it’s actually true. I’ve heard a million times in my life that reading in the dark is bad for your eyes, and it turns out there’s no definitive proof of that. So is the “things are changing faster now than they used to” argument the same kind of misguided conventional wisdom?

Unfortunately, no. Things actually are changing more quickly now than in the past, and here’s a brief example. In the 30 years between 1950 and 1980, our communication strategies changed absolutely not at all. If you wanted to talk to someone who was not physically in the room with you, you could either write them a letter or call them on a landline phone. Those were your only two options. For three decades, nothing changed.

However, the 30 years between 1980 and 2010 are a different story. It’s difficult to pin down exactly how many new methods of communication have popped up in the past three decades, but here’s a sampling:

• Mobile phones

• Email

• PDAs with a stylus and modified alphabet (remember that one?)

• Text messaging

• Video chat

• Instant messaging

• Virtual conferencing

I’ve probably missed a few. The point is, in the 30 years between 1980 and 2010, we added several new methods of communication into our existing portfolio. That might not seem like a lot, but it’s infinitely more than we came up with between 1950 and 1980.

Perhaps this will put things into a clearer perspective. Match.com, which upended thousands of years of established courtship practices by allowing people who might otherwise never meet to find each other through the Internet, launched in 1995; here we are, 20 years later, and more than one-third of all marriages start online. Netflix, which introduced mail-order DVDs and basically destroyed the brick-and-mortar movie rental business,⁵ was founded in 1997; barely 15 years later, half of all U.S. homes subscribed to Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, or another video streaming service. TiVo, which revolutionized the way we watch television and completely changed the advertising world’s revenue models, was founded in 1999; just over a decade later, in 2012, over half of all U.S. homes were using DVRs. iTunes, which forever transformed the music industry, debuted in 2001; in 2013, digital music revenue accounted for 39% of the music industry’s total global revenue. YouTube, which has given everyone with a camera the ability to become actor, director, teacher, reporter, expert, and critic, opened its digital doors in 2005; two years later, in 2007, it consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000, and it is now the world’s second-largest search engine.

⁵ Except for Family Video, whose growth and success in a decaying industry could make a business book all by itself.

As you can see, each of these innovations has fundamentally altered an industry landscape in less than 20 years. By comparison, the first gasoline-powered automobile debuted in 1886, and 20 years later fewer than 8% of U.S. households had one. The television was developed as the combination of a series of technologies in the 1920s; by 1948, a mere 0.4% of U.S. households had one. So yes, things are changing faster now than they used to.

But again, that’s an overused and unhelpful platitude. So let’s change the phrasing a bit.

If you’re an Old Person—that is, if you came to maturity before the Internet really took hold, which we discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4—then for you today’s world is changing faster than it used to. The pace of change has accelerated, as have the number of changes that impose themselves on a daily or weekly or monthly basis relative to what you experienced when you were younger.

However, if you’re a Young Person—if you came to maturity after the Internet really took hold—then today’s world is changing for you at exactly the same speed that it always has.

This is the critical distinction. Today’s Young People are moving at the only speed they’ve ever known. This rapid-fire world is the only one they’ve ever lived in. This is their normal, and more importantly for our purposes, that’s why they like it.

When we talk about different attitudes toward change, the rise of the Internet has split us into two generations as neatly as a surgical knife. That’s not to say all Old People move slowly or that all Young People can’t stay focused. But it does mean that Old People have almost universally been forced to adapt to today’s hyperactive world, while Young People were almost universally born in it, and that distinction has led to some difficulty. Many Old People want the world to move at the speed that it used to and so occasionally respond to new ideas with kneejerk dismissal, while many Young People have little experience with or appreciation for established best practices because they’re accustomed to seeing “best practices” replaced every 18 months.

Our different perceptions about the speed at which the modern world is changing is probably the most significant factor in explaining why Young People and Old People often approach change from different angles. Very simply, these two generations have grown up with markedly different expectations about the speed at which changes will and should occur. So if you are a Young Person frustrated by the apparent resistance of an Older colleague to a new idea or innovation, try to appreciate that some of that person’s resistance might be due to the fact that she is struggling to come to terms with how frequently she’s being asked to change. And if you’re an Old Person trying to persuade a Younger colleague to operate at a more rational pace, keep in mind that she might be agitating for constant change because she’s been trained to believe that she will otherwise be left behind by a world she’s never seen move slowly.

There is a third factor at play as well, and it has to do with one of the most dangerous words in the business world: complacency.

⁶ As I write, BlackBerry is in the midst of a resurgence, and its stock is among the top performers for the year. If it manages to successfully reinvent itself as a software company or security provider, as it seems to be in the process of doing, that will be an enormous credit to the company; but that success will have no bearing on the fact that its earlier complacency cost it its dominance in the smartphone market.

Complacency is a risk to us as individuals as well. Studies have shown that people who live in hurricane and tornado zones become less likely to heed disaster warnings the more often they hear those warnings, especially when those warnings result in no or minimal damages. Similarly, HIV-positive patients are increasingly less likely to get tested for the disease today despite the fact that rates of infection are on the rise, a distressing situation attributable in large part to the fact that HIV has become a chronic (as opposed to fatal) condition. When we become complacent, we take fewer precautions and anticipate fewer risks.

However, the true danger of complacency is that it is often completely justified. Every winter we’re all encouraged to get a flu vaccine, and every winter millions of people choose not to do so and also avoid contracting the flu. Every year someone at your business talks about a potential threat or promising opportunity, and every year several of those threats fail to materialize, and many of those opportunities turn out to be less promising than expected. In these cases, complacency and inaction are a perfectly fine way to behave, which only reinforces our belief that complacency is acceptable. So we’re even more complacent the next time around, and the next, and the next, and every time nothing happens our complacency is further justified—until finally something does happen, until that threat finally does turn into a reality or that disaster finally does decide to strike, at which point the most complacent people are left stranded (often literally) while their better-prepared peers and competitors scramble to safety or take advantage of others’ helplessness.

Interestingly enough, complacency is caused by exactly one thing and one thing only: repetition. If we hear enough disaster sirens without experiencing an actual disaster, most of us start to slowly ignore the warnings. If a friend of yours complains all the time without ever seeming to do anything about his problems, you will slowly but surely stop lending weight to his complaints. And if your business continues to be profitable year after year after year, you will pay less and less attention to vague mumblings about customer shift or upstart competitors.

Moreover, repetition is a function of time. The more time we have, the more we’re able to repeat something. Which means that the Older or more experienced we become, the more likely we are to grow complacent with whatever it is we’re currently doing. In general, the more success we’ve had doing things a certain way, the less value we place on acquiring new skills or changing our approach. Why should we change something that’s been so successful for so long?

This tendency toward complacency shouldn’t necessarily be interpreted as a critique of Old People, any more than their appreciation of existing practices and processes should necessarily be interpreted as a compliment. These qualities are simply a function of the fact that we get older. As we age, all of us eventually accumulate enough experience and success that we learn to value the systems that have allowed us to achieve that success; and at the same time, all of us tend to downplay new approaches in favor of what we have found to be successful in the past. These predilections are in all of us, and this explains in large part why Young People often come across as impatient (they haven’t been around long enough to appreciate the value of existing systems), while Old People often come across as stuck in their ways (they’ve been around long enough to become complacent with the success they’re familiar with).

In other words, you’re asking people to engage in deliberate practice, which is the key to becoming an expert performer at anything—ice hockey, ballet, change management, sewing, or adopting innovations. As we pointed out in Chapter 5’s discussion of expertise, the quality of the practice we engage in is even more important than the quantity of it. To quote Anders Ericsson:

We agree that expert performance is qualitatively different from normal performance and even that expert performers have characteristics and abilities that are qualitatively different from or at least outside the range of those of normal adults. However, we deny that these differences are immutable, that is, due to innate talent. Only a few exceptions, most notably height, are genetically prescribed. Instead, we argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.

In other words, doing what comes naturally will eventually limit your ability to improve, while forcing yourself to push against your own boundaries will allow you to grow. A chess player who spends 10,000 hours playing against the same opponent will not become a grandmaster. The grandmaster is one who spends 10,000 hours playing different opponents, analyzing different strategies, reading books, studying other people’s play, talking with fellow players, and actively resisting the tendency to play an easy game when a harder one will possibly teach him or her something new or better.

That’s deliberate practice. And deliberate practice will make your Young People more appreciative of existing systems and your Old People more willing to consider innovative ideas.

So how can you make that happen? How can you encourage your colleagues and employees to deliberately improve when doing so goes against their natural instincts? How can you force people to engage in the kind of intentional, concentrated practice that turns an ordinary athlete into an Olympian? Is it even reasonable to expect your entire team, department, division, or company to be an expert performer, to simultaneously achieve Olympic-grade levels of appreciation for your existing systems and the need for constant innovation?

Which means that all you need to do is remind your people of these truths.

Here’s how.

As before, the first step to bridging the generational divide with respect to stasis, change, and innovation is to find the areas in which we are all similar so that you can bring everyone you work with closer to Us on the Us/Them line.

As you can see, we are all strikingly similar. If we have been successful—or, at the very least, if we have avoided being unsuccessful—then all of us want to keep doing things the way we’ve always done them. At the same time, all of us are constantly changing and innovating as a natural consequence of our ever-changing circumstances. This is true across ages, genders, cultures, and historical eras. When it comes to stasis vs. innovation, all of us are overwhelmingly Us.

In fact, the only significant differences between the generations on this point are relatively minor and very easy to manage.

In many ways, this isn’t a generational issue at all. There’s nothing inherent in Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, or Millennials that makes an entire group of people cautious, rigid, adventurous, flexible, or anything else. Our attitude toward stasis, change, and innovation is the predictable result of the way we all evolve as we age and acquire experience. There’s nothing new happening today that hasn’t been happening for centuries. The rise of technology and the Internet may have accentuated the natural division between more- and less-experienced people, but this tension has existed for as long as human beings have been around.

It might sound daunting that we’ve been dealing with these issues throughout human history, but that actually makes the solutions a lot easier because all you need to do is what people have been doing all along: encourage your Young People to see things from the perspective of their Older or more-experienced colleagues and vice versa. All it takes is to get people to put themselves in someone else’s shoes, pure and simple. Nothing you need to do here will require a new strategy of any kind.

Perhaps you want to convince your employees or colleagues to continue doing something you’ve been doing in exactly the same way for the past decade. Or perhaps you want to encourage someone who’s been doing the same thing for a decade to consider a new approach. Either way, here’s what you can do. And again (I’m sure you’re tired of hearing this by now, but I can’t stop myself), none of this is going to cost you anything.

When it comes to stasis vs. innovation, the most important point is that last one: Nobody is always right 100% of the time. Sometimes business as usual is the best course of action, and sometimes change is necessary. It shouldn’t be too difficult to provide examples of the value of both approaches, and by doing so, you’ll be bringing everyone closer together on the Us/Them spectrum.

However, doing so will only solve the change management problem in theory, and theory is a bit different than practice. In theory, I am the best tennis player in the world, given that I have never lost a match, and every professional tennis player has lost several of them. However, I’ve also never gotten around to testing that theory since I’ve never bothered to play tennis, and I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that my theory might not hold up if I were to give it a shot.

Similarly, getting Young People and Old People to agree that none of them is always right is one thing. But it’s another thing entirely to get them all to agree when you’re talking about a specific procedure, purchase, policy, or anything else. Fortunately for you, my publishers threatened me with death if I didn’t write a chapter about it, so I went ahead and did it.