What Happens If We Don’t Change? The Real Cost of Not Changing
Not changing is a legitimate option. You can stay exactly where you are right now, keep doing what you are doing, and in some cases that works out fine. In other cases, it does not. Question 3 of the 5 Questions of Change is about getting honest with yourself about which one you are actually facing: what happens if nothing is done?
Staying the Same Is Also a Choice
The first two questions in The 5 Questions of Change cover the why (see Question 1) and the finish line (see Question 2). Question 3 asks you to weigh the cost of not changing against the cost of changing, both personally and professionally, before you commit either way.
Why Businesses Get Forced to Change
Having spent a good chunk of my career in gaming, hospitality, and utility, I have seen a lot of the reasons businesses get forced to change. Regulations and compliance drive a lot of it: new legal requirements can force a business to change how it operates whether leadership is ready or not. Shareholder activism can do it too, when people buy up shares specifically to put new leadership in place and drive change from the board down.
Southwest Airlines is a live example of exactly that. In 2024, activist investor Elliott Investment Management built an 11 percent stake in the airline and pushed hard for change. Within a year, Southwest ended its open seating model, a policy it had used since 1967, and dropped “bags fly free,” a perk it had offered for more than 50 years. Neither change was something Southwest wanted to make. Both happened because a shareholder with enough leverage decided the cost of staying the same had gotten higher than the cost of changing, which is the whole idea behind this question.
Technology outpacing the business is another big one. Updating software, hardware, and the processes tied to them is expensive and time consuming, so businesses put it off, sometimes until the cost of not changing becomes impossible to ignore. In late 2022, Southwest Airlines posted a $220 million net loss in a single quarter after its crew scheduling technology, which the airline itself later called vastly outdated, collapsed under a winter storm and canceled more than 16,700 flights. The total hit to the business was around 800 million dollars. That is what the cost of not changing looks like when it finally catches up.
Why Personal Change Is Harder
There are good reasons to want personal change too. Maybe you are not happy with how things are going, or you want to do things differently. But personal change is not easy. It often requires being uncomfortable, spending money to build new skills, and stepping outside your comfort zone. Sometimes it happens whether you ask for it or not, which is why building resiliency before you need it matters. That resiliency comes from looking honestly at how you have handled change before, building on what worked, and adjusting what did not.
Change Stops Asking for Permission
Here is the uncomfortable truth: change eventually stops asking. When a doctor tells you to change your lifestyle after a diagnosis, that is not always easy or fun to hear. But it catches up with you either way. The people who handle this best are the ones who built flexibility and a clear why before they needed it, so when change is forced on them, they already have a plan and a destination instead of starting from zero.
Steve Jobs and the Cost of Delaying Change
I am a big Apple fan, so this one is personal for me. Steve Jobs, one of the most change driven people in modern business history, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and advised by doctors to pursue conventional treatment right away. Instead, he delayed surgery and standard treatment for months in favor of alternative and dietary approaches. By the time he did have surgery, the cancer had progressed too far, and he passed away in 2011 at age 56.
Jobs changed entire industries, changed the products we all use, and changed himself constantly throughout his career. Yet in this one domain, he held tightly to his own belief system. It is a reminder that even the most adaptive, change driven people can resist the change that matters most when it hits closest to home.
Lance Armstrong and Denial as a Change Strategy
Lance Armstrong is a different kind of example, one about ethics and reputation rather than health. For years, he denied doping allegations aggressively, attacking journalists, teammates, and anyone who raised the question, doubling down on his existing story instead of adapting to mounting evidence.
In 2012, he was stripped of all seven Tour de France titles and lost his major sponsorships and partnerships. His reputation shifted from inspirational to defined by denial. The issue was never a lack of information, there was plenty of it. The failure was emotional and reputational inertia. Earlier accountability would almost certainly have reduced the damage. Refusing to change the story once the facts changed turned a reputational problem into a reputational collapse.
The Risk Matrix: A Tool to Measure the Cost of Not Changing
Here is a simple tool to get clear on the actual impact of changing or not changing: the risk matrix. Rate probability from 0 to 5 and impact from 0 to 5. Take the zombie apocalypse as an example. If it happened tomorrow, the impact would be a 5, wildly disruptive. But the probability is close to 0. High impact, low probability, not worth building your whole strategy around.
Apply the same matrix to your own “we are not going to make this change” decision. Sometimes staying where you are really is fine, low impact, low probability of real disruption. But use the matrix honestly, because most of the time, staying in place is not actually the safer option it feels like.
How to Use the Risk Matrix on Your Next Change
Next time you are deciding whether to make a change, plot the cost of not changing on the matrix just like you would plot the change itself. Rate the probability that staying the same causes a real problem, rate the impact if it does, and be honest about what the numbers tell you before you decide to wait it out.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Cost of Not Changing
Is it ever okay to not make a change?
Yes. Not changing is a legitimate choice when the risk matrix shows low probability and low impact. The point of this question is not to force change for its own sake, it is to make that decision with clear eyes instead of by default.
How is the risk matrix different from the urgency question in Question 1?
Question 1 is about explaining why a change matters and why now. The risk matrix here is about evaluating the cost of not acting at all, including situations where you have not decided to change anything yet.
Why do smart, capable people still resist necessary change?
Because resistance is often emotional, not informational. Steve Jobs and Lance Armstrong both had access to plenty of information. What they lacked in the moment was the willingness to act on it, which is a very human, very common response, even among highly capable people.
Watch the Rest of the Series
This post covers Question 3 in detail. Catch up on Question 1: Why This, Why Now and Question 2: What Does Success Look Like, see how it all fits together in The 5 Questions of Change, or keep going to Question 4: How to Nail the What’s In It For Me When Leading Change.
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Trying to figure out whether a change is actually worth the disruption? Contact Jason directly. Every training he has led started with someone reaching out first.
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