This somewhat provocative model helps you to check what expectations you have of an upcoming change/innovation process: How much will have actually changed in practice afterwards?
Authors Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler asked themselves why a year in which a company earned exactly as much as in the previous one is considered unsuccessful.
In their search for answers, they came across a model by blogger Jessica Hagy. She presented expectations and results of a change process in an intersection model . In their representation, the intersection between A “As it is” and B “As it will be” is relatively small: C.
An interesting interpretation of Hagy’s model emerges when placed in context with Professor Philipp Zimbardo’s findings. He describes three categories of people living in different time zones:
1) Past oriented
“Past Negatives” are defined by mishaps and missed opportunities. “Past Positives” are nostalgics who rave about the past.
2) Present oriented
“Hedonists: Happiness seekers and “non-planners,” the believers in fate who cannot plan their future for reasons of religion or class.
3) Future oriented
“Planners” proverbially say that everyone is the architect of his own fortune. “Afterworlders” assume that true life begins only after the death of the body.
According to Zimbardo, people in the Western world are predominantly “planners” or “past-oriented.”
So if one looks critically at change and asks whether it is really always desirable or at least indispensable, one can use Hagy’s model as a suggestion: Is C so small because so much attention is paid to A and B?
