Change. What's it all about? Appreciating the moment.

Flying home on Air Canada from a talk to the American Advertising Federation I was leafing through EnRoute, the airline’s in-flight magazine. I was intrigued by their announced changes to a more customer-centric orientation by providing new amenities, more space and greater comfort. These are all good, right? Are people really resistant to change?

If creativity results from a restlessness to improve the status quo, then that means that people are driven to change what is, and who doesn’t want that?  We are on a constant path for making improvements away from dissatisfaction toward satisfaction. People like satisfaction, change, and look forward to it. Ever see people’s eye’s light up when they get new clothes or finish redecorating their homes? People are happy about taking vacations or having time off of work because they are anticipating a change of pace. As my college-friend Wayne Hawthorne would often say, a change is as good as a rest.

Politicians continue to remind us to vote for change. The daily news reports changes all the time. If it didn’t, would we pay so much attention. We look more for what’s new than for what already is. In fact, a chief creative thinking technique is to take a close look at what is already familiar, and make it, in someway strange – by noticing something about it never seen or appreciated before.

It’s time to lose the notion that people don’t like change, we love it. It shows growth, movement, vitality. Perhaps its more the discomfort of getting accustomed to the new is what we don’t really like.

Joanie Mitchell’s song lyrics from Big Yellow Taxi recognize changes happen and supports appreciating the moment. “Don’t it always seem to go that we don’t know what we want till it’s gone;  You pave paradise and put up a parking lot.”

People aren’t so resistant to change, they don’t want to lose the comfort they know. So here’s the question – recognizing that conditions are changing now faster than ever before on the planet, what are ways to maintain your comfort while adapting and, at the same time, making decisions so the future will have comfort too?