Life, and change management, and people’s behaviors, are not linear. Excuse my language – I’m assuming the reader’s understanding of mathematics is similar to mine, which is that I just about get it, and I’m ready to go back to the textbooks if necessary. So don’t panic, bear with me. There is something about our education that assumes linear connections and the proportionality of cause and effect. After all, ideas such as ‘the punishment must fit the crime’ are deeply embedded in our culture. We praise measured responses and balanced reactions. ‘Proportional response’, for example, is a military term indicating the degree of force to use when attacked. The language of cause and effect is well-embedded into our education, too, so it’s no surprise that the idea of output being proportional to input seems eminently logical. ‘So much of this, will produce so much of that.’ ‘You increase this, you get more of that.’ There is a predominant, learned mental model within us. In mathematics and physics, it would be called linear. We could say we are educationally, socially and epistemologically (the theory of knowledge) comfortable with linear systems. Sorry, it sounds grandiose, but it isn’t.

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