This will come as absolutely no surprise, but different people have different attitudes toward change. Some people like to move fast and break things, and others like to move slower and break fewer things. So in this article we’re going to explore the concept of change – why some of us like it more than others, and how our attitude towards change evolves as we age and gain experience.
Let’s first imagine that you are a young or new employee at your company. You haven’t developed a solid reputation yet, but you want to, because you’re eager to start climbing the ladder and gaining more responsibility and opportunity. For you, change carries a lot more positives than negatives. Recommending a particular change or trying something nobody else has tried can bring you a lot of credit if things go well, but it won’t hurt you very much if they don’t. Not to mention that for young or inexperienced people, trying new things or developing new processes is an excellent way to demonstrate your ability to think creatively and begin developing a reputation as a competent, valuable addition to the team.
The older we get, though, and the more success we have, the more we have to lose by taking a flyer on an untested approach. Once we’ve developed a reputation for making good decisions, most of us don’t want to risk that by trying a bunch of things that end up being bad decisions. The benefits of trying something new start to seem less valuable than the benefits of sticking with the things that have brought us our current success. Thus, as we age and gain experience, our need to change slowly decreases, and so our appetite for it tends to as well. This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, of course – there are 80-year-olds who love trying new things and 22-year-olds who hate it. But in general, our attitude towards change does evolve in this direction as we gain age and experience.
There’s also a flip side to the success that we accumulate as we age. The older we get, the more failure we witness or experience personally. We see more things that looked promising but never took off, or things that were wildly popular for a minute and then faded away entirely. And because we’re intelligent, we tend to get more and more cautious when the next shiny thing comes along. Most of us don’t want to repeat mistakes we’ve made in the past, which means that as we age we tend to require more information and make decisions more slowly than we did when we were younger. Again, this isn’t true of every single individual, but it is a general tendency.
Which leads to an important point about change for young people. The reason that older people generally like doing things “the way they’ve always done them”…is because the way they’ve always done them HAS GENERALLY WORKED. Whatever your company and colleagues are doing right now represents the best, most intelligent collection of strategies that anyone who has ever worked there has ever come up with. One of the reasons that older, more-experienced people sometimes resist change is because those changes threaten the stability of the systems that have helped them achieve the success they currently enjoy.
At the same time that all of us should appreciate the value of current practices, however, everything is always evolving. All of us have been bombarded with the notion that the world is changing faster than ever before, which isn’t especially useful to hear. So hopefully this will help. For old people – for all the so-called Gen Xers and older, for everyone who got their start in the world before the Internet came along – the world is changing faster than it used to. For young people, though, who have grown up with all this technology, the world is changing at exactly the same speed it always has. This is their normal. It’s the only speed they’ve known, it’s the only one they’ve been trained to, and it’s why they like it. So just like younger people need to appreciate that our current practices and processes exist for very good reasons, older people need to appreciate that the world seems to be changing faster than it does for younger people, and that difference in perception can create a disconnect. But if you understand where it comes from, and that each group of people has good reasons for their attitudes, then you’ll be able to work together more effectively.
So what can you do with all this information? I’m glad I asked that for you, because it leads nicely into what I’m about to write. For one, older, more experienced people are not inherently change-averse or ‘stuck in their ways’. Rather, they tend to be confident that their current systems are good ones because they’ve proven to be good up to this point, and they tend to require more information than younger workers because they don’t want to repeat some of the mistakes they’ve made or experienced in the past.
On the flip side, younger, less-experienced people are not inherently impatient and impulsive. Rather, the speed of the modern world is the only speed they’ve ever known, and they also tend to have more to gain than lose from challenging the status quo. When they come up with new ideas or question existing approaches, they aren’t necessarily attacking existing ways of doing things; instead, they’ve been trained to believe that best practices are going to change every six or nine months. They’ve seen upstart companies come out of seemingly nowhere and completely disrupt long-standing, deeply entrenched industries in the space of a few months.
That’s why everyone, at every age and experience level, needs to be talking to everyone else. If you don’t talk to each other, you can’t learn anything you don’t already know – and once we stop learning, eventually we stop succeeding. Gathering multiple perspectives is the best method we have ever developed for deciding if the changes we’re considering are ones worth pursuing. I hope this article has inspired you to seek out the advice of those who approach change differently than you do, and to ask them why they think the way they do. Thanks very much for reading it.
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This article adapted from Overcoming Generational Differences available on LevityUniversity.com
