Several years back I was sitting on a kind of shuttle going to an event, and a woman next to me started chatting. She mentioned that her husband's office had recently gone to a casual dress code. I started to reply in some anodyne way about the virtues or lack thereof of such a dress code, but she kept on going.

"Yes, we had to buy him a whole new wardrobe" she said.

I didn't really get this - I had thought the essence of a casual wardrobe was that one dresses "casually" ie

Casually \Cas"u*al*ly\, adv. Without design; accidentally; fortuitously; by chance; occasionally. [1913 Webster]

She carried on and described their joint mission: "I need to buy him one brown leather jacket, and one black one, and…". I don't recall the remainder of the specifics, but I do recall the brown and black leather jackets. Presumably shoes, belt, and chinos fit into the mix somewhere as well.

What stuck with me here, though, wasn't solely the seeming absurdity of their conclusions (which one can decide to justify: perhaps his non-suit wardrobe was only pajamas or something). It was the mismatch of communications between the change in workflow that the organization had decided to adopt, and the interpretation of the change that the individual had had. Its as if the following dialog of the deaf had occurred:

"You no longer have to wear a suit, as we no longer prescribe your work uniform" says Company.

"What, then, is the new uniform?" replies Employee.

The employee pattern is "I wear a uniform". This is so ingrained that the (perhaps trivial) change is only heard in light of the old pattern. At least at the beginning, whatever real change the company was trying to effect totally flew by workers in this category. If they wanted people to be more relaxed, more individual, more personal - whatever their motives were ("Spend less on clothes!") - they were utterly and completely lost.

This is, on balance, I think, the way people generally react to change. They essentially reject it, no matter what the purpose or virtues, often without any consideration of the benefit, and simply try and continue to behave in the "old" way, perhaps maladjusting the "new tools" so they can be conformant on the surface without actually altering their approach. Even in 2011, we've all seen this with even with tools as widely used as email: the people who use email because thats more or less the required work tool, but they have their admin print it out, mark up the reply by hand, and write a response (perhaps in the third person). The benefit of email is completely missed, but the person can proudly state that s/he uses the "new" tools.

Because I'm mostly living in a "new new thing", technology environment, the series of thoughts that spring to my mind on this subject are primarily technology adoption type of thoughts, but of course this applies to other aspects of change as well. When told to quit drinking alcohol, a drinker might reply, "But what then will I drink at the bar?" when of course the intended takeaway is "Please spend your time elsewhere, not at the bar". There are whole disciplines essentially aimed at coercing people to re-educate themselves and build new personal patterns (see for example Cognitive behavorial therapy, a technique that as far as I can tell is aimed at re-educating yourself by training yourself with repetitive behavior, rewards, and punishments, like a dog - that is also as far as I can tell fairly successful in certain areas where all other approaches fail).

Of such root causes do immense disciplines - and consulting bills - spring up. Paul MacLean proposed the model of the Triune brain, since invalidated as a detailed model but accepted as an organizing principle, wherein our "reptilian brain" owned these

…instinctive behaviour patterns of self-preservation [which] include 'primitive' behaviours… responsible for automatic behaviours associated with territoriality, ritualism, social dominance, status maintenance, deception, tendency to follow precedent, awe for authority, social pecking order behaviour, compulsiveness, deception, prejudice and resistance to change… rigid, obsessive, compulsive, and paranoid 1

Perhaps this is the root of it: our deeply seated, reptilian impulse to keep doing the same things the same way, a kind of evolutionary "don't mess with success" model, that persists even in the face of evidence, however logical, coercive, or even overwhelming the countervailing forces are. In this case, our change management consultants have all been looking the wrong way: its simply all about Godzilla vs the forces of civilized society. We don't need the complex buy-in process, the gradualism, the explanations and reactions, the pilots and user studies. We just need a few direct hits from an F-18.

Now thats change I can believe in!