Many people are optimistic about the 21st century and see it as an opportunity to

make positive changes to the world. To what extent do you agree or disagree with
their optimism? What changes would you like to be made in the new century?
Along with the rapid development of human society, we are experiencing a change
that never happened before. A majority of people take an optimistic attitude to the
coming of new millennium. Personally, I think the coming of 21 century will bring us
not only more opportunities, but also more challenges.
It is no doubt that the 21 century will bring us more opportunities and improve our
life condition. For individuals, the development of medical skills and new medicines
will save more precious lives; the further communication among countries will also
produce more chances for individuals to visit other countries and to study new
knowledge, so that by enriching their knowledge and experiences, make them more
eligible for their careers and contribute more to the society. In turn, in terms of
countries, the development of individuals will lead to them stronger and more
abilities to sever citizens, thereby creating more harmonious atmosphere and living
environment for human being.
However, at the mean time, there will be many potential challenges. We do not
need to mention other things, only pay little attention to News we will know how
many tragedies happened every day. Earthquake, tsunami, hurricane and so on, are
threatening our lives every seconds. So if these phenomena do not be investigated
clearly, human will still under the threat of natural forces.
Personally, I hope the new changes in new millennium will include the following
things:
First, it is the issues existing in present society, such as education, employment and
medical care system, as well as housing. Secondly, I hope the formation of natural
forces that cause severe damages could get a clear answer. I also hope we could
get reply about why they form; what we can do to prevent them; and what we can
do to avoid these serious and disastrous results.
In conclusion, the coming of new millennium will bring us both opportunities and
challenges. Facing it, human being still has many arduous assignments to deal with.
In my opinion, I hope we could solve not only the society problems but also the
formation principle of natural forces.

Past and Prologue:

Why I Am Optimistic About the Future

Representative George E. Brown, Jr.

In my discussions with the science and engineering community, I have advocated change in
two areas. First, I have asked scientists and engineers to become more involved with the
political process and the broader societyin other words, to be more effective citizens. Second,
I have challenged every one of us involved in science, engineering, and public policy to
rethink our assumptions and make needed reforms in how we operate. I want to reissue these
challenges and note some specific areas that call for attention.
I will be very frank. First, because I am getting too old and cranky to allow politeness to
obscure the message I am trying to send, but also because we are facing a set of very tough
policy issues that demand our attention as fully as any issues in recent history. These issues
challenge the status quo and generate a great deal of discussion and energy. Unfortunately,
too often the discussions take place in the halls outside of scientific meetings, and the energy
is directed at excising or softening mention of these issues in AAAS reports or National
Academy of Sciences (NAS) science policy studies. The time has come for open, frank, and
thorough examination of the challenges to be overcome if we are to continue our pace of
progress into the next century.
Let me preface all of this by clearly stating my deep admiration for all that the science,
engineering, and academic community has accomplished. We have created a wondrous
understanding of our universe, opened new vistas of opportunity for every human on Earth,
and, at least for the moment, managed to end a period of global confrontation between the
United States and the former Soviet Union that had endured, and endangered the human
race, for the last 50 years. We are perched on the edge of a new millennium, with society
enjoying previously unheard of advances in human knowledge that science and engineering
helped create.
No area of human knowledge remains untouched by the developments of science and
technology in the past 50 years. The biological sciences have been transformed, and
miraculous biotechnology applications have become commonplace. Physics has been
through the nuclear age and looks for new worlds to conquer. Information science and
technology has given new meaning to the term "one world," a meaning undreamed of when
that term was first coined. Astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, gravitational science, and
solar exploration have each become robust and exciting research fields that are creating jobs
here on Earth.
My remarks are driven by a realization of these accomplishments and reflect my optimism
for the future. But that attitude is tempered by the knowledge that we will not achieve our
promise unless we reevaluate and reform our system of research and education and the
integration of new knowledge into society. With every advance humankind makes, we are

required to achieve a higher standard of performance. It is that higher standard that I want to
address. We must, as science always does, challenge existing theories and strive to push our
understanding and our world view further out.
My remarks also come from an increasing realization that we are on the cusp of a number of
changes in the way we conduct our research and education activities.

The ease of past support for research bred a passive policy approach that must be
replaced by an active, anticipatory science policy, now that we need to renew public
support.

During the Cold War we adopted a competitive approach to all that we did, including
our research and education efforts, but we now find ourselves in an interlaced global
society where success is increasingly found in cooperative ventures.

Where disciplinary inquiry has ruled for most of this century, multidisciplinary
approaches are now in the ascendancy.

Feedback loops between science and technology are becoming more numerous,
making old distinctions between basic and applied research less meaningful and
reinforcing a cooperative, inclusive approach both to the conduct of research and its
application to market-mediated needs.

Centralized and linear organizational approaches, which have defined everything

from the way institutions are designed to the way they approach research problems,
are being replaced by distributive, decentralized networked organizations.

Even the nature of learning is changing, strongly influenced by our PC-based world,
as older hierarchical, pyramids of knowledge taught in a linear fashion are giving
way to exploratory, nonlinear, task-driven methods of learning.

As exciting and challenging as it is to be in the midst of all of this change, our research and
academic enterprise, however, is anticipating little of it. It provides little leadership in setting
goals for change and thus may even project a public attitude of being resistant to it. The
enterprise seems to be resting on its past success, idolizing its current organization and
operations and hoping that inertia will carry it into the 21st Century. We employ a passive,
post-hoc justification for our activities to compensate for the lack of a valid system of
performance metrics. We take a narrow view of our responsibility to society in the
transformations that we cause. We have no foresight or planning operation in place that
would tell us how to define, measure, or achieve greater success. We have no real sense of
how to conceptualize social and economic systems or subsystems and describe their
linkages. And we have no clearly defined values for our enterprise that are sufficiently
visionary to justify the public confidence and support that we seek for our science and

technology efforts.
Scientists testify that the basic research funded yesterday in agency X resulted in new
product Y. But they refuse to take responsibility for any unplanned social consequences of
that product and avoid predicting tomorrow's outcomes of today's research. Many science
and technology groups eagerly offer observations on or criticisms of federal science funding
or they provide suggestions on how their favored programs could be enhanced. But these
groups run to the hills when asked to provide their own "ideal" budget and identify spending
offsets or revenue sources. In order to avoid being justifiably scalded for inadequate
mentoring and counseling of Ph.D.s, the scientific community points out how many
physicists happened onto jobs modeling stocks on Wall Street. It is as if these serendipitous
events justify the public's investment, let alone the student's personal investment, over 8 or
more years of graduate study.
We shy away from the difficult work of developing qualitative measures for our efforts,
leaving us with simple, quantitative means to evaluate our success in science and academia.
An individual researcher is measured by the number of publications or citations, the amount
of research dollars obtained, or the number of graduate students mentored. Universities are
similarly ranked by quantity. For example, the Carnegie Classification of Academic
Institutions is based on a simple measure of input of research dollars and output of Ph.D.s.
However, when the policy process tries to impose its own evaluation measures, as is
happening with the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) or with state efforts
to impose performance-based appropriations, these measures are resisted as being too
simplistic to determine the qualitative aspects of the system. All of this leaves us with a
clumsy and unsophisticated set of tools for evaluating the best of human innovation and
thinking.
At the end of the day, few assessments of outcomes are being done for any of our science
and engineering education activities. As a result, what passes for policy analysis is too often
a set of simple assumptions that we passively accept as truth, absent an adequate means of
evaluation.
This can lead to problems, such as the one examined in the report issued by the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, The Undergraduate Experience. This
publication describes undergraduates at research universities across the country as "secondclass citizens" who are herded into dull classes taught by inexperienced faculty and given
little academic guidance or support. The report accuses the universities of devoting too much
attention to faculty research and graduate students, while neglecting the needs of
undergraduates, especially freshmen, whose tuition provides the campuses with most of their
income. These are sobering statements, but evidence of a situation that has been allowed to
languish due to the lack of a vigorous system of evaluation.
I doubt that anyone would sign on to a research project as poorly designed as our current
national experiment in science and technology policy. It would be intolerable to run an
experiment without a clearly defined problem statement or thesis, without fully identified

variables, using inadequate measurement tools, and being forced to use increasingly outdated
algorithms while running the whole operation amidst such uncontrolled and undefined
change. Yet that pretty much sums up our current situation. It has worked out well for many
individuals and institutions, but not according to any clearly articulated plan or design.
But even if we were to solve these shortcomings in the operations and evaluations of our
current system, we would still be left without a clear set of social goals against which these
activities would be measured. Even if we develop a perfect operating system with a perfectly
designed evaluative process, our scientific enterprise remains adrift, without a connection to
the broader society. If we believe our own rhetoric, we have to assume that the state of our
knowledge allows us to envision unheard-of transformations. Given that we can completely
transform the world with our knowledge, we are morally compelled to answer the question,
"What is the end that we seek?"
And in this consideration we must truly take a global view. While the end of the Cold War
has freed us to move in new directions, it has also eliminated an easy justification for our
science and engineering efforts. Information and communications technologies are on the
verge of unifying the globe in new ways. Voice-oriented personal communications satellite
systems will be available later this year, and Internet-capable satellite systems soon after.
These technologies start to make definitions of national boundaries and national identities
obsolete and, coming at a time when individual governments can no longer go it alone on
large science undertakings, are opening up vast new opportunities for international
collaboration of all kinds. At the same time, many countries that used to depend on our
research for their economic gain are imitating our success and starting to develop their own
research-university systems, further expanding opportunities for international research
collaboration. These emerging international conditions are not being adequately accounted
for in our national science and technology policy, let alone included in a discussion of goals
and values for research and education.
Domestic transformations are occurring as well, with many of them due to economic change
driven by applications of new knowledge. But our economic well-being masks an old set of
problems that are made worse in a technology-based society.
People who are simply standing still will be left further behind as the pace of scientific
discovery continues to accelerate. The shortcomings of our K-12 education system make this
a dangerous situation, and in many states one-third to one-half of the incoming college
students require remedial education.
This knowledge gap leads to grave divisions in the distribution of the benefits generated by a
knowledge-based society. From 1977 to 1994, even before the current economic boom, the
income of the top fifth of society went up 20 percent in constant dollars (the top 1 percent of
our society gained 72 percent!) while the income of the middle fifth stagnated and the
bottom fifth declined 16 percent. As we right-size and replace permanent jobs with
temporary positions, we increasingly resemble a feudal state with a serf class of part-time
and contract workers employed by a class of owners. (I note parenthetically that 40 percent

of higher education faculty are contract, part-time, or adjunct faculty.) Without permanent
benefits, the serfs have little chance of gaining ownership and thus little chance of profiting
from the boom on Wall Street. It is sobering to observe that only 40 percent of Americans
own stocks or mutual funds, even in their retirement systems.
This income gap shows up on campus as students are increasingly dependent on student
loans. Public grant programs are drying up and many institutions are shifting scholarships
from a needs-based focus to use them as recruiting tools in order to attract bright students to
help university rankings or well-off students to improve institutional cash flow. For the first
5 years of the 1990s, the outstanding student debt equaled the total student debt from the
1960s, '70s, and '80s combined. Alarmingly, the rate of debt increase for minorities was
twice the rate for white students, a data point that grows in importance as affirmative action
programs come under attack. Faced with the need to pay back large debts, some people may
not go to college or, upon graduation, opt out of the additional debt of a graduate degree in
science or engineering.
We cannot continue in this direction much longer. This is the richest nation in human history,
yet a black teenage male in the United States has a higher chance of being sent to prison than
graduating from college. These and a host of other depressing statistics hidden behind our
current celebration reveal the nagging problems we face. This situation leads, on one hand,
to social unrest and instability, conditions that will threaten our continued economic wellbeing (and which in past ages brought down the beauty that was Greece and the glory that
was Rome). On the other hand, those people left technologically disenfranchised constitute
underutilized human resources. They could have been brought along through better
education and training to perform the high-technology jobs that companies now seek
immigrant scientists and engineers to fill.
At this point, you may wonder where the optimism is that the title of this chapter promised. I
have laid out the problems we face. Now, what do we do?
First, let me state again that all of what I say is driven by my optimism. If I did not think this
system could realize its great potential, I would not have delivered the Carey Lecture. Most
of the change taking place in the world is positive, even though it may disrupt the status quo
that the United States finds so rewarding. The Cold War is over and the financial and
intellectual resources that were focused on that 40-year stalemate are now freed up to be
more fully devoted to social progress. Telecommunications advances and economic
relationships are uniting the world in ways that make future global conflicts less probable.
The internationalization of science and technology moves us toward cooperative global
ventures that, while they will affect our unchallenged lead in many areas, are likely to
produce a greater level of human advance. Domestically, the deficit beast is back in its lair
and we now have the luxury of developing a new science and technology policy that is not
driven by the budget.
But the challenge is how to address the issues I detailed above using the options presented to
us by the positive changes taking place. Let me throw out a few suggestions to stimulate

thinking.
First, I will address the international front. I will dust off an old suggestion I made around
the time of the Superconducting Super Collider debates and the early Space Station
controversies. We should systematically review outstanding science needs, plans, and
opportunities around the globe in order to create a multidisciplinary directory of science and
technology initiatives. From this list we should plan a comprehensive series of collaborative
agreements wherein we could work with international partners on the development of these
projects, including their siting, burden-sharing, and so on. As we enter an international age of
science, it makes no sense to continue our ad hoc, item-by-item approach to international
collaboration. I have even suggested that a special office in the State Department be
empowered to negotiate these comprehensive agreements.
On a related topic, I am aware of a great number of cooperative science agreements that we
have signed that we have not funded. I have suggested, and have discussed with the
Appropriations Committee, an amendment that would prohibit us from negotiating
international science agreements until and unless we have the funding to make good on these
agreements. In an age of global science collaboration, we cannot afford to develop a
reputation as an unreliable partner.
Along these lines, I believe that it is time to establish a range of multilateral research
foundations, self-funding operations that live off their endowments (like the U.S.-Israel
research programs). In this way science can be directed toward common human goals, rather
than driven by the national policies of any single government. The major impediment to this
progress is the outdated, Cold War-era foreign policy mindsets in foreign ministries and the
Departments of State, a situation on which organizations such as AAAS need to focus.
On the domestic front, I have a number of proposals to help overcome our passive approach
to science and technology policy. First, I think that the science and engineering community
should work toward the development of an entity to perform broad forecasting and
technology assessment work. The biggest mistake that the Republican majority in Congress
has made was eliminating the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). Without it, we have
no place to integrate technology with social impact and are left blind on a host of
complicated issues. I note that Europe is replete with national technology assessment
organizations of various types, mostly stimulated by our experiment with OTA. Now we are
conspicuous among developed nations in having abandoned this needed function. I ask that
AAAS, the National Research Council, Sigma Xi, or some other broad national scientific
organization undertake a scoping study to see what need exists and how such a national
entity might operate.
If GPRA and performance-based funding are not appropriate measures of quality in research
and academia, and I have my doubts, what is? We need better productivity or quality
measures for our research activities, both to guide needed reforms and to have concrete
justifications when the public asks, "What are we getting for all of this?" The science and
engineering community should take the lead in developing qualitative standards, with strong

participation from the broader society. This is the best way to avoid having inappropriate
measurement tools imposed upon you. Further, the exercise will help create needed
connections to the broader society.
We also need to conduct outcomes assessments for our science and engineering activities and
we need to collect the data needed to make these assessments. For example, we have no idea
how much of the roughly $12 billion that we spend on academic research goes to support
graduate education because grantees are not required to report whether they in fact hired the
research assistants that they proposed to hire in their grant applications. The question of
whether we are spending enough, too much, or too little to support graduate education
cannot be answered at present because we lack the data.
Graduate student employment outcomes also need to be reported more widely and should be
used to assess universities, university departments, and individual laboratories. There is no
reason that graduate students, parents, legislators, and the general public should not have
data on the professional placement of graduates 3 and 5 years after degree in order to help
make personal and policy decisions on the state of graduate education. Also, postdoctoral
positions should be clearly identified and not tucked among general employment headings.
Higher education is one of the three or four major investments a person makes in a lifetime.
We don't invest in the stock market or buy a house without adequate information about our
potential investment. Why do we tolerate inadequate performance information about our
higher education investments?
At this point I was going to also make some suggestions about the relationship between
research and education at the university level, but I feel that the recent report by the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which I mentioned above, has been adequately
thought provoking.
Next, I ask that AAAS, NAS, or some other respected multidisciplinary group develop a
normative science budget. We repeatedly hear reaction to the President's budget and to this
bill or that legislation, and we hear how Congress needs to develop a rational priority-setting
process for science and technology funding. Congress does have a rational priority-setting
system. Unfortunately it is largely ZIP-code based: Anything close to my district or state is
better than something farther away. Individual colleges and universities and many federal
labs know this system well and have used it to their advantage for decades.
But if the science, engineering, and academic community is serious about having a different
priority-setting process, the political system will need guidance from it. Unless you help
develop the values (again, involving representatives of the broader society) and use them to
develop a budget road map, we will be stuck with our present system. I went through the
process of developing an investment-based budget last year and learned a great deal about
budget priorities and politics. The fact that this process was so painfully informative leads
me to call upon the research community to finish the work that it started in its reports on
priority-setting for science funding and develop its own value-based budget.

On the issue of budget priorities, I recently raised an issue that I am sure is being discussed
by members of AAAS: Is the rate of increase in funding at the National Institutes of Health
(NIH) too rapid? The recently passed FY 1999 Senate Budget Resolution, which generally
treats research funding unfavorably, would have NIH's budget grow to 51 percent of all
civilian research and development funding, up from about 38 percent today. One is led to ask
if that is a good balance.
In our Democratic "Views and Estimates" on the budget we suggested that some of the large
increase proposed for NIH might be transferred to other science accounts that needed
additional resources, hoping to spark some discussion about priority-setting. Since no
response seems to be forthcoming, let me speak more plainly and help focus and extend your
conversations.
I am concerned that we are not carefully observing and publicly discussing the sustainability
of the growth in biomedical research. The number of biomedical Ph.D.s and the capacity of
biomedical Ph.D. programs around the country are growing in direct response to increased
federal funding. This is producing flat to declining rates of successful research applications
at NIH, shrinking grant sizes measured in constant dollars, and increasing times to first
position in biomedical disciplines, time spent in postdoctoral positions, times to first federal
funding, and so on. Similar patterns could be found in the fields of physics, mathematics,
chemistry, and some engineering disciplines during the boom days of defense research in the
1980s. We all know what happened in those fields when funding flattened.
I propose that we use biomedical research as a case study to see what the impacts of
generous federal funding are when delivered using our current systems of incentives and
rewards for research and our current approaches to graduate education. I know that Dr.
Harold Varmus at NIH has some of these same concerns and I commend him for his attention
to this issue. For the broader scientific community, such an inquiry may reveal that the
answer to every science policy question is not simply, "More money!"
I would also find a comprehensive study of the priority-setting process in the health sciences
very interesting. For example, most of the major health problems facing society are driven
by behavioral choices: smoking-related disease, alcohol-related disease, diet-related disease,
suicide, homicide, accidents, and AIDS from intravenous drug use and unprotected sex. If we
were using this priority list to drive health research, we would create a very large "Institute
of Behavioral Sciences" to capitalize on the high public health payback resulting from
changed lifestyle choices. We would place less research emphasis on elegant curative
approaches and put a higher priority on mundane behavioral modification. This example,
while simplistic, illustrates the results that confront us as we examine our system for prioritysetting in research.
In another critical area, I suggest that in order to build bridges to the general public and to
hear their concerns we should diversify our various science policy and advisory boards. We
need more involvement by the general public in our science and engineering activities.
Putting lay people on advisory boards is one way to accomplish this. We have experience

with lay representatives on technical bodies and they have been generally favorable; the
recombinant DNA advisory committee comes to mind as one example. I would also diversify
these boards by age and make sure that young scientists and engineers are adequately
represented on advisory entities, within government, at laboratories and universities, and
within professional societies. This is especially critical for any inquiry into the future
directions of science since the pace of change makes past experience in education and
research increasingly outdated.
I want to suggest one final point of action. The scientific community should review the
present reward and incentive system in order to reinforce the needed changes revealed by all
of this inquiry. It is pointless for any of us to speak of reforms that emphasize a stronger role
for education if a faculty member is judged mainly by the research that he or she performs. It
is meaningless to speak of cooperative or interdisciplinary research if the rewards system
discourages this behavior. All of the partners in this enterprisefunding agencies, research
institutions, and universitiesneed to review our present reward and incentive system to make
it reinforce the needed adaptation and change.
Now I am sure that there are other specific actions we could take to reach the promise held
by our system of research and education. I am also sure that having made these suggestions
many in the science and engineering community will think that I have, once again,
abandoned reason and my support for science. Let me conclude by dispelling that thought.
I offer these remarks out of pride and optimism. I am proud to have played a small part (at
least to have been an observer in the policy process) in many of the advances made during
my time in Congress. We have used science to vanquish most of the demons that have
confronted free thinking and open inquiry. We have made it possible for remote villages to
connect to the rest of society for the first time, moving closer to the concept of the
Noosphere, a global knowledge-linkage of every being on Earth cooperating on one grand
undertaking. We have made physical and temporal limits to our existence increasingly
meaningless.
But having risen to a new level of accomplishment, we are hindered in our progress by the
system we have outgrown. Simultaneous with our celebrations of advancements, the system
we employed is revealed to have narrow vision, simple structure, and crude methods, as we
move into the more sophisticated world it created. And so we gradually realize that the
methods of inquiry we have employed for the last 50 years are transformed by the
understanding that they have generated. Given the transcendent nature of the knowledge that
has emerged, we can ill afford to let ego or convenience cloud our vision on what we need to
do next. To simply be content with the status quo would be an abdication of the
responsibility accepted by humanity when it first set out upon this quest of knowledge.
Our responsibility to our predecessors and our commitment to what we now call "scientific
method" is described most eloquently by Sir James George Frazer in The Golden Bough,
written in 1922:

We stand upon the foundation reared by generations that have gone before and we can but
dimly realize the painful and prolonged efforts which it has cost humanity to struggle up to
the point, not a very exalted one after all, which we have reachedThe amount of new
knowledge which one age, certainly which one man, can add to the common store is small,
and it argues stupidity or dishonesty, besides ingratitude, to ignore the heap while vaunting
the few grains which it may have been [our] privilege to add to itWe are like heirs to a
fortune which has been handed down for so many ages that the memory of those who built it
up is lost, and its possessors for the time being regard it as having been an original and
unalterable possession of their race since the beginning of the world. But reflection and
enquiry should satisfy us that to our predecessors we are indebted for much of what we
thought most our own, and that their errors were not willful extravagances or the ravings of
insanity, but simply hypotheses, justifiable as such at the time when they were propounded,
but which a fuller experience has proved to be inadequate. It is only by the successive testing
of hypotheses and rejection of the false that truth is at last elicited. After all, what we call
truth is only the hypothesis which is found to work best. Therefore in reviewing the opinions
and practices of ruder ages and races we shall do well to look with leniency upon their errors
as inevitable slips made in the search for truth, and to give them the benefit of that
indulgence, which we ourselves may one day stand in need of: cum excusatione itaque
veteres audiendi sunt [it is with good reason, then, that old people must be heard].
These are the simple challenges I lay before you. And don't blame me for raising these
issues; blame your genius whose excellence raised the standards for success.

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"Survival of the Finest in the 21st Century"

By Christine Corelli

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If there's one word that captures America's movement into the next century, it's "change." As we move into
the 21st century, we've seen a global economy emerge that is characterized by rapid change, technological
and scientific breakthroughs, a more multi-cultural and liberal society, and an unprecedented level of
competitiveness in business. Takeovers, mergers, downsizing, and reorganization are the norm with
organizations in every industry today.

It is technology that is most dramatically changing our world. Because of modern technology we now live
and work in an era of knowledge, information overload, and speed, where our lives are now choreographed
to move, work, learn, and finish projects faster - all to service the "customer" who has become more
demanding than ever. Executives are calling for us to get "lean and mean" and "do more with less" - so that
they cannot only survive, but be able to move forward. They are constantly restructuring and instituting
change in the insatiable race for growth.
For engineers, who in the past have been accustomed to working on their own, must now be a player in a
"high-performance team," and are expected to not only embrace change, but come up with creative ideas
and solutions to problems that don't fall under their job description. Many are finding this difficult, as they
are used to having things the "way they used to be." Through it all, loyalty, hard work and engineering
expertise no longer guarantee a job for life.
How are many of us affected? We are experiencing the erosion of stability and security and all too often,
feeling pressured to perform. Business structures have changed so dramatically, organizations and engineers
are asking, "How do we survive?"
If we are to survive, it is critical to learn to cope with change. Many people feel totally unconnected to the
new reality that is around them, and are working with others who are displaying the stress and often chaos
that is involved in change transitions. It can be helpful to understand the basic five phases most people
experience in adapting to change - whether it is a new role they must play - a new skill they must learn, a
merger, restructuring, new management, or a new way of doing things.
Five phases most people experience in adapting to change:
1. Resistance. Comes from fear.
Most people are basically creatures of habit. They may resist change because it can mean coming out of
their comfort zone and perhaps risking failure. You can recognize resistance easily as people will criticize,
complain, withdraw, or become unsupportive of others. There may be loud vocal protests, or, they will
appear to "do what they have to do" to keep their job, but they will not do more than is required.
2. Uncertainty. How will it affect me? Can I handle it? How will things change? Will the change really be
good for the company?
Will I lose my job?Most individuals will be uncertain about their ability to do what has been asked of them.
They may be concerned with whether they will be able to perform and may be having difficulty with new
procedures, technology, or skills they must learn. Worse, they will suspect that perhaps their jobs may be on
the line. Some will express negativity as to whether the changes that have been made will really benefit the
company. They may wonder "What's in it for me?" Productivity may be reduced, and creativity is hampered.
3. Assimilation. Acceptance - a little at a time, one day at a time.
As people begin to move from resistance to assimilation they begin to gradually implement change. Slowly,
they begin to try. They cease complaining, and begin to adjust to what is required. Unfortunately, moving
from resistance and uncertainty to assimilation does not occur overnight. The one factor that often is
overlooked when implementing change is the time needed to learn. All change takes time.
4. Integration.

Integration occurs when people have begun to accept the changes. Confidence builds while learning and
adjustments have taken place. They may make suggestions to help...
5. Acceptance.
Acceptance is the final stage of adaptation to change. You will be able to see that when people have reached
the acceptance stage, they appear less stressed and become more supportive.
We've heard the old adage before, "The only constant is change." Yes, change is inevitable, but it doesn't
have to be agonizing. If you recognize the five stages that people go through to assimilate change, you can
help facilitate the process.
Here are a few things you can do to help others through change:
1.

Encourage acceptance of change and help others to see positive opportunities.

2.

Lead by example. Keep an optimistic attitude. Offer to help people if they are struggling.

3.

Be attuned to the difficulties others may have in adapting to change. Change affects everyone
differently.

4.

Be patient. All change takes time for adjustment.

Here are a few things we can do:

1.

Use positive self-talk

2.

Focus on your strengths.

3.

Bend with the whirlwind of change.

4.

Keep your life in balance.

We must be willing to adapt to change. For many people, when it comes to surviving in the 21st century,
their biggest problems in coping are internal. Change can be positive, promoting our own personal and
professional development.
Charles Darwin taught us about "Survival of the Fittest." Today, it is not only the strongest who will survive
but also those who are the most adaptable. Those who are resilient, and can adapt to change will not only
survive, but also thrive in the new millennium. I call it - "Survival of the Finest in the 21st Century"