Change sucks. Or vive le change. It all depends on your perspective, of course, and more importantly (and more cynically), where your interests lie as regards the change in question.
What’s amazing is that although we recognize self-interested behaviours associated with reactions to change in others, we don’t often recognize them in ourselves. Or, more ominously, we rationalize our own behaviours away. We’ve all got interests in outcomes. The key is recognizing where we’ve got vested interests, and separating out logical, objective arguments on behalf of a position from those where our views are clearly tainted by self-interest.
If we argue against logic and on behalf of our own self-interest, we’ll damage our credibility in our organizations badly, if not mortally. Case in point: people from all over the world who have an opinion about, and vested interest in, wine from Bordeaux. An American wine-critic guy named Robert Parker has poked a hole in the whole self-interested world of Bordeaux wine making by questioning the way things are done there. How dare he? Weird thing is, prior to Parker and company, this was a case of self-interest gone wild that ruled the Bordeaux wine world for over a century.
History lesson: the French have been making extraordinary wines in the areas around Bordeaux since Roman times. And they’ve always thought, with good reason, that their wines were among the finest in the world, and should be priced accordingly. Sounds reasonable, n’est pas? Where it started to get weird was in 1855 when the best Chateaux wines were assigned “grand cru classifications,” ranging from 1 (cr