It may be an exercise in the obvious to say that thriving organizations and communities practice different relationships to change.
In stuck organizations and communities, even when leaders and obstructionists give lip service to change, most actions preserve the status quo. Here, change is assessed as a risk and generatorintolerable levels of unknowns.
In thriving organizations and communities, people value change because change is intrinsic to the well-being of living systems. Change is valued as a field of possibilities and rich learning.
Today we see formerly powerful governments and corporations fail to be sustainable precisely because they choose to hang onto the past rather than shift into a new future. The average longevity of even the largest corporations is less than the lifespan of people who make less than $2 a day.
Significant and sustainable change in organizations and communities requires specific capabilities. It requires learning, creativity, pragmatism, passion, vision, courage and resilience. Real change is more about capability than capital.
Interestingly, these are the qualities of people who are happy.
Research studies worldwide continue to indicate clearly that happiness makes people more productive, generous, healthy, and resilient. Communities, regions, and countries with happier people have dramatically fewer business, social, education, and health care costs.
The most direct way to create positive change is to create happier people. This means creating happiness literacy and policies that make happiness more possible.
It is profoundly naive to think that unhappy people are capable of a positive relationship to change. Unhappy people oppose engagement in change even when the costs of doing so far exceed the benefits of viewing change as opportunity.
The happier people are, the more intrinsic passion and authentic commitment they have for a new future.
The only realistic expectation is that unhappy organizations and communities tend to be ambivalent and resistant to change in all of its forms. They make change much more difficult than it ever needs to be.
The work of successful change is the work of creating happier communities and organizations. As it turns out, we now know how to bring this about. More organizations and communities are thriving in making happiness a prime metric for their narratives.
People make positive change more possible when they develop their capacity for the practices of happiness, specifically their capacity for appreciation, generosity, interest, lightness, and easy.
In the Happiness Trends Survey I conducted in 2011, we found that the happiest 20% of people on the planet consider happiness to be the result of practice. Happiness is not something we have, it is something we do.
When we design organizations and communities to engage people in ways that make these practices more possible, people flourish in change. When the practices of happiness are core to the way we go about change in our world, people learn how to thrive together.
