What's everybody (secretly) getting from this dysfunction?

The Change Question: What's everybody (secretly) getting from this dysfunction?

We underestimate just how much people love the status quo, even as they are irritated, frustrated, and trapped by the status quo.

It’s not that they like pain, or misery, or mediocrity.

It’s that they get something from it.

I often frame it as understanding the Prizes and Punishments from a choice. 

Do it, don’t do it. There are prizes and punishments for either one of those choices.

If we’re wanting change, we typically shine a light on both the Prizes for the new system and the Punishments of the old.

We forget to understand more deeply the Prizes of things staying exactly as they are. They’ll be both deeply personal and quite generic:

Familiarity

I know my place

Certainty over ambiguity

Predictable drama

Not confronting

Sunk cost

People and systems to blame

Nostalgia

(What did I miss?)

Deming said, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does.”

The system resists change because that’s the nature of a system — yeah homeostasis! — but at a more atomic level, people love the system as it is, even as they feel frustrated by it.

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