We like to think that we can easily change things in the world. That’s no surprise, Barack Obama makes the Americans believe it can be done, and with the Wisdom of Crowds in mind, many think that crowd-sourcing can easily be applied and be used to change things in the world, that haven’t seem to have changed that much in the last decades, or even centuries.

Why is everyone convinced that we can change that much? And do we understand what change is, what change is anyway? I’m not convinced. Change is a process that is mostly referred to as social change. These processes occur in society, in a community and even in an organization. To succeed, these processes need to challenge existing and sometimes deep rooted cultural behavior. Changing the behavior of a single person is difficult, but changing the behavior of a large group of people seems impossible, at least on the short term.

Change is a constant process, it happens all the time. It is only constrained by time, which can not be constrained. However, change is emergent, that means it is slow, and more problematic, it’s spontaneous. That means it is difficult to control. Therefore change can not be designed or planned, it just happens, it emerges spontaneously. Initial change can be radical, but change that’s there to stay for a while, is emergent.

Think about evolution. It is an ancient process, still going on. Evolution is not the same as revolution. Change is evolutionary. Why is it that many people are after revolutionary changes? Why do many people believe that it is possible to change things in a very short period of time? Why do many of us think we have to change things very fast? It can we we speak of technological changes. However, humans haven’t changed much during the last decades, just some minor variations based on genetics, health-care, better food and education, but no radical changes. Again, why do we think we can change so much and so fast?

So the question we should ask ourselves, if we would like to change things, for example in an organization, how do we cope with the fact that change is happening all the time, but very slow and emergent, while we want to have influence to have the change go to some desired direction? I’m not sure on answering the ‘how’ question, but what we can do is arrange meetings with some people, or groups of people (maybe Open Space can be a start), that enables us to exchange ideas and opinions where others can build upon. Try to make use of the strength of people, which is communication. If change is there as a given, use communication strategies to have change happen for the good of most people. That’s what matters most. But be patient…