I remember fellow students, in high school, complaining about having to learn algebra.  “When am I ever going to use this?”  The teacher would come up with some lame example about dividing pizzas or something like that, but people were rarely convinced.  Well, I am going to do you one better:  I’m going to talk about the importance of calculus in your daily life—specifically, the concept of the derivative.  I promise that there will not be a quiz at the end.

A derivative, in calculus, represents the slope of a line tangent to a curve at a particular point.  The steeper the curve, the larger the derivative.  I real life, this means that the derivative represents an instantaneous rate of change.  Why should you care?  My thesis, today, is that we are more sensitive to a rate of change than we are to the change itself.  I find that weirdly fascinating, yet also helpful.

Take gas prices, for instance.  Gas prices dropped dramatically during the early days of the pandemic.  Most of us noticed (and were pleased) but since we weren’t driving much, we didn’t much care.  And we rarely gave much thought to a change that impacted us in a positive way, except to think “Cool” when we filled our tank for $20.  As our world started to open back up and we started driving more, prices started to creep up.  Supply and demand started to match up and prices recovered to where they were before the pandemic.  There was grumbling, since even though logic tells you that those pandemic prices wouldn’t last, we very quickly got used to those lower prices.  Then Russia invaded Ukraine and the global price of a barrel of oil shot up on fears of short supply.  (I know this is an over simplification, but I don’t think you want me diving into the details of global supply, reduction in refining capacity, and how pricing on commodities works.)  What we saw was the price of a gallon of gas rising at an extremely rapid rate.  The derivative was super large.  Now, I don’t want to minimize the impact of going from $3/gal gas to $5/gal gas on people with very limited flexibility in managing unexpected costs.  However.  For most of us, the increase in cost to fill our tanks hasn’t really changed our driving habits.  There are still plenty of people out driving around at 80 mph, heading to the Poconos or the Jersey Shore.  Maybe people have cut back in spending elsewhere, but that hasn’t really shown up in consumer spending data.  But there sure is a lot of complaining about the price of gas, because the price went up so quickly.

This concept of the importance of the derivative, of managing the rate of a change, is critical in understanding how to create any change that will last, be it in your workplace, society at large, or even within yourself.  Push too much change on people too fast and there will be swift and harsh resistance.  Meter change out at a slower rate, a smaller derivative, and the chance that the change will be accepted and internalized is much greater.  I’ll start with a scary negative example.  Hitler did not create Nazi Germany over night.  It took over a decade of careful meting out of small changes that built on each other over time.  This did not happen by accident.  He knew exactly what he was doing.  He started by recognizing how beat down the German people were after WWI and, taking advantage of the need to build national pride again, gave people little steps to take to reestablish their sense of self and empowerment.  Had he tried to go directly to “Kill all the Jews and conquer Europe!” he would have been met with swift resistance.  The derivative would have been too large.  He kept the slope on that rate of change low.

This concept can also be used in a more positive way!  I believe in the MLK Jr. statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” Many of us may be impatient to see greater social change—especially those of us who live with negative impacts daily.  I’m well aware that progress often happens in a “two steps forward, one step backwards” progression, but progress does happen.  It has to happen at a rate that can be absorb by the larger society.  In the mid-90’s, during my years at the bench developing products for use in industrial paints, I had the chance to meet the guy from the EPA who led the efforts to reduce solvent content in these paints.  It was at a summer Gordon Conference, which were very informal get togethers on the campuses of sweltering New Hampshire prep schools without air conditioning.  There would be a topic (in this case Industrial Paints and Coatings) and people from all walks of life—government, universities, industrial companies—would get together to share the latest scientific research on the topic and play really pathetic games of basketball.  One night session, I was sitting up in the back row of the seminar room where there was a nice cross breeze from open doors.  I ended up sitting next to Jim and we started talking about the state of the industry.  He was feeling down because we were at a point in time when industry members were pushing back hard on the latest round of EPA goals for solvent content, giving him all sorts of grief about how unnecessary they felt the next stage of regulations was and how the performance of paints was going down and costs were going up from more expensive ingredients, yadda yadda yadda.  He began talking as though his entire career was worthless.  I reminded him about where we were back in 1970 when the Clean Air Act first came out and these regulations started to be created.  “Jim, look how far we’ve come!  And, more importantly, WE ARE NOT GOING BACK THERE!  The bar of minimum acceptance has moved permanently higher.”  I really do not think people would want to go back to the paints with these high levels of solvent and the carcinogenic compounds in them.  Even though industry fought him every step along the way, those regulations spurred innovations that have given us products that are, for the most part, better and definitely safer.  The changes and developments happened over decades.  And that combination of performance and safety is now what we’ve come to expect.  It’s been normalized.

Human beings seem to be naturally resistant to change.  I’m sure that is for some evolutionary reason.  The difference between people today seems to be that we have differing levels of comfort with rates of change.  While I hypothesize that this may be a fundamental difference between Progressives and Conservatives, it is also a function of who is affected by the change at hand and how.  If the change makes your life better, you’ll want it right now.  If you perceive you’ll be unaffected or disaffected, you’ll resist.  I have this annoying tendency to say “No” to almost everything when a change is thrown at me.  Trish has learned to plant an idea, let it marinate, and then come back and prod a little bit.  When I’m cranky about something, though, it’s amazing how quickly I will agitate for change.  The more unhappy a person is with the status quo, the more they will want change to happen and to happen quickly.  Waiting for someone to “get comfortable” with putting out a fire, when you are burning and they are not, is really frustrating.  And when enough people are burning, well, that’s when bloody revolution tends to happen.

Most change, though, doesn’t have to involve such dramatic urgency.  I want to leave you with that thought of the derivative—understanding that someone who seems resistant might be reacting to the rate of change more than the change itself.  Give people time, but keep nudging.  Don’t let them off the hook in accepting the status quo.  Remember, also, when YOU are resisting that you might be responding more to the derivative.  Challenge yourself on that.  We are resilient creatures, us humans.  We can get accustomed to a lot of things.  Is that good or bad?  Well, that was in the other essay.