Agile Life

In the United States of America we have term limits and very frequent elections leading to changes in leadership. At election time, from local to national, you often hear candidates offering “change.” However, I have been thinking about when our nation really experiences “change.” It seems to me that real change follows some event such as a stock market crash, war, or terrorist attack. Those events have a galvanizing effect on our society and make change possible because the nation in general for some period of time starts moving in the same direction. However, under normal circumstances, as old administrations depart and new ones arrive what we often see is not change at all but realignment. Realignment occurs when new leadership with different values takes over and starts aligning the people and policies with objectives that represent the values of the new leadership. Value-based realignment is probably a good thing because in a democracy the values of the majority are represented. However, there is another type of realignment that is territorial in nature. Territorial realignment basically takes the form of attacking the previous leadership’s accomplishments or works in progress. A new administration wants to make sure they completely own the success and will work to ensure that success can’t be attributed to the previous administration, especially when the values of the new administration are radically different from the old administration. What is the upshot of territorial realignment? Well, instead of making steady progress we are continually backing up and starting over. Instead of standing on the shoulders of those who have come before we are continually reinventing things. At what cost? I think it would make an interesting economic study to discover the cost to the American people of territorial realignment in the 20th and 21st centuries. Exposing that cost may get us to value progress much higher than we value marking our territory. Then again maybe it is just human nature.