Handy on Frogs

In 1989, Charles Handy wrote The Age of Unreason (ISBN 0 09 975740 0). In it, he said:
“If you put a frog in water and slowly heat it, the frog will eventually let itself be boiled to death. We, too, will not survive if we don’t respond to the radical way in which the world is changing.”

Handy warns us that the status quo and continuity is the comfort zone that the establishment in organisations hold on to to stay in control; and it is because of this that they often learn too late. He goes on to argue that discontinuous change is not a catastrophe, that it is the only way forward and that it is all around us. He says:

"There are opportunities as well as problems in discontinuous change. If we change our attitudes, our habits and the ways of some of our institutions it can be an age of new discovery, new enlightenment and new freedoms, an age of true learning."

Both of us are great Handy fans. He has done so much to bring to life crucial ideas of the way in which we live and work now, and the way in which we may live and work in the future.

This was the first time that we had come across the frog used as a metaphor, and it certainly stuck!