Imagine, if you will, a dog. He barks at cars all the time. It has become such a regular occurrence that your situational awareness is that if a car passes, the dog will bark. Now imagine a period of time where the dog doesn’t bark at all and then suddenly the dog barks. You step outside and see a car’s taillights receding into the dusk. It would in that moment be very east to assume that this was the only car moving on the street in either direction for a time, because the dog didn’t bark. This would be an easy assumption, because there would be no assumption that the dog was learning not to bark at cars.
The example seems random, but it hits a key point: people don’t really have a mechanism for recognizing gradual change. If there is an expectation for someone or something to change, they won’t see it until the behavior has changed by significant fraction. This immediately ignores all the hard work that went into the from end of designing that change. It discredits that work to the point where incremental change is dismissed almost out of hand as ‘no real change at all.’
I know it seems like a random post, but change is something I’m dealing with both professionally and personally and I watch this happen. Change for the better is never noticed until the change is profound and consistent enough to challenge the dominant ideology. Change for the worse is instantly noticeable and seized upon.
I think a lot of that boils down to human fears and insecurities… And don’t get me started on the politicization of change, because thats a rabbit hole I don’t have enough minutes to peak down.