People don’t like change
- Abhijit Das
- Mar 23
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 14
When conversations with like minded founders and leaders hit a change alarm, it is simply a common ‘people problem’ to solve together.
We are creatures of habit. Our brains are wired for efficiency (maximum rewards with minimum effort); “cognitive miserliness” inherited from our ancestors have kept us around this far. We are not the lazy ones. Our ancestors had resource limitations, thus the energy saving adaptation was in order. Research suggests that imagination and creative thinking consumes more energy than repetitive tasks. Intuitively they grasped that much about themselves.
We are designed for resource limitations.
Living in modern apartments, racing towards goals against time in trains, cars or motorbikes, challenging our limits with tasks which help catch up with the bills, and the little extra - are the daily limitations of our life - today as they were yesterday. How many of us could claim a luxury of resources as a way of life? On a different scale, as a business the growth pitch, shuffling cash-flow and capital conversations, again that is ‘no luxury of resources’ indication. Resource limitations seem to be a constant, as does “cognitive miserliness” in the human condition. And resource limitations didn’t just apply to our ancestors. What some researchers refer to as "path dependence" in cognition, (where our brains prefer established neural pathways over creating new ones) is our default mode. The revelation is how ‘path dependence’ as a cognitive bias also shapes our institutional and organizational designs too. Imagination and creativity remains a path less preferred.
Our evolutionarily optimized brain running into modern high-speed world is experiencing a “cognitive-evolution lag”. Our mental hardware hasn’t caught up to our information environment. Decision fatigue, attention-scarcity and a general mental exhaustion despite physical comforts in our environment is normal. Novel problem-solving would require us to RESET from our default mode, breaking out from efficient, low-energy neural pathways. Tired? Sure. But we can’t skip the RESET and hope to continue.
In the context of business, this RESET is required - both in our systems and ecosystems, and it begins with a personal RESET. Evolving our cognitive architecture is inevitable. The cognitive architecture RESET is more fundamental than even embracing AI into our personal lives, workflows or business architecture.
Conquering design limitations is a mindset.
Organizations and governments tend to evolve incrementally rather than fundamentally reimagining structures. This parallels how our brains prefer established neural pathways. Complex regulatory systems often reduce nuanced problems to manageable categories and checklists. This reflects our cognitive tendency to simplify complex phenomena into heuristics.
Loss of credibility in decades old global organizations like the UN, fading relevance of policy frameworks like the USAID, Brexit, EU falling apart, Global Value Chain disruptions, Tariff wars - just to name a few, are a sign of our design limitations due to our inherited cognitive bias. We need to fundamentally reimagine structures and relationships therein. Political cycles, quarterly financial reporting, and immediate metrics optimization mirror our cognitive preference for immediate feedback over long-term planning.
Our institutions reflect cognitive architectures optimized for a different era of complexity and speed. Thus the landslide of restructuring mandates across categories - Banking, Fashion, Auto, FMCG, Advertising, Consulting - you name it. The challenge becomes designing systems that acknowledge our cognitive limitations while still enabling the creative thinking needed for adaptive responses to complex problems.
But People don’t like change. Not until you show them the change they’d like to see. Even then, change is never a cakewalk. Thus it is critical to consider the question of “Why change?” as broadly and deeply as possible throughout a rebranding process before taking the wheel. Let’s try to get a sense of this substance called “change”.
Change is always received uniquely (personally), even when the source of it is common or seems obvious. The difficulty in driving change or driving through changes multiplies when empathy as an ingredient of change is overlooked.
We apply ourselves through change uniquely, developing an individual taste of the process and its probable outcomes. We compare our personal experience of change especially when collaboration is in order. It is because the experience of change is never identical to everyone, even though it may bear similarities in its appearance. The lifestyle changes over COVID lockdowns were similar or even same to a great extent for all involved; irrespective of age, profession, vocation or location; for example wearing masks, carrying hand sanitizers around, staying home, getting vaccination, etc - changes which looked identical, appeared over a shared timeline, but left a unique impact. Each one of us has a personal experience with change.
In the context of business, while change is individual, evolution is collective. Look out for collective goals or a higher calling camouflaged in the change process. Driving change or driving through change is for a common purpose - evolve. Change for the sake of change isn’t a brand building prerogative.
Design for continuity is designed for evolution.
Diving into change with a rebranding call-to-action poses a typical void - where are we going with it, what’s in it for us, what would it look like?
What meaning does the answer to “Why change?” hold for you?
Zoom in too close and all you’ll gather is a haze and a glimmer of colors - a small sign of something. Zoom out too far and you’ll miss the constellations which may have meaning. Meaning is an entirely human pursuit, subjective and accomplishment. Remember to account for subjectivity. Like to like, comparisons may be desirable but never an escape. Looking for absolutes is an invitation towards a bumpy ride and head-on collisions. You dived in to be you, so that no other could be you.
Now consider another metric in tracking the needle of change - time. Again, we are literally in different timezones in the experience of change. The timelines could be compared but without an exactitude in the duration of change between ‘0’ to ‘X’ or what impact could “0 to 1” make.
In the first year of a brand relaunch our client achieved 30% growth in their annual revenues. Coming at this outcome from shrinking revenues they felt good. Year after, they grew a newly launched subcategory up to a steady 8% revenue contribution (MoM) and 5% growth in annual revenues, penetrated new markets while experiencing 10 percent YoY growth in their distribution network. Achieved all this by staying profitable while some of the largest competitors were bleeding and experienced revenue decline. Would you call it a success? Depends. Get obsessed with familiar numbers and cycles of change and you are sure to miss the outcome which you had wished to trigger with the roll of the dice.
How do you put the future at the service of the present? Building brands is building a compelling and irresistible force - force majeure. Comparing expectations on brand growth by connecting marketing metrics is a self-imposed resource limitation. Brand is the basis of continuity and a moving needle of change pointing towards evolution is proof enough.
Rising above time and risk is not gambling.
RESET is not a gamble. Short-termism is not a RESET. Without a long term commitment and proportional touches along the way, it is short-termism, and isn’t solving anything. Short-termism just isn’t the right mindset to begin with. Short-termism produces results which bring along another set of outcomes as fires to fight. Have you noticed climate change commitments and data sets vanishing from government agenda recently? Do you think AI has produced any real value so far? Are these a reflection of our cognitive preference for immediate feedback (results) over long-term planning? Is it another design limitation thanks to our primitive coding continued?
“The revolutionary idea that defines the boundary between modern times and the past is the mastery of risk: the notion that the future is more than a whim of the Gods and that men and women are not passive before nature. Until human beings discovered a way across that boundary, the future was a mirror of the past or the murky domain of oracles and soothsayers who held a monopoly over knowledge of anticipated events.” - Peter L Bernstein
Committing to RESET is about building long term value and not gambling. Grow some conviction and you could enjoy the process of change. Because the lack of it will drain you or drown you. People don’t like change because they don’t like risk but are essentially gambling away time. Long term value awaits conviction beyond cognitive miserliness.
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