Communication, Communication, Communication

Much debate has been kicked-off by Wagner James Au's article http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2011/03/second-life-users-hate-and-fear-change.html#more which suggests the residents of Second Life are resistant to change.

Everyone is a little fearful of change: it's human nature and a long understood, natural reaction.

Where change in SL provokes rants across blogs and forums, is an indication not of the character of the resident (because fearful reaction should have been presumed) it is, rather, a failure to effectively communicate the reasons for, and the benefits of, change.  That's surely Change Management, Day 1, Opening Session?

It's stating the obvious to say that residents (or any user base, customers or workforce) is resistant to change.  Those introducing the change should be aware of the obvious and, effective introduction of change should involve communication and explanation.

Even negative explanation, or reasons why a change might be to the perceived detriment of all, can be acceptable.  Truth is best.

An example would be, a company struggling to make money during a recession, best for it to openly address its workforce and say, "sorry we must cut everyone's salary.  It's either that or redundancies and, potentially, the bankruptcy of the company as its wage bill exceeds its profit.  Until we make more money we either cannot afford to continue to pay you all at your current rate, or we need to pay all of you less."  This news is not going to be greeted happily, but mostly everyone will understand it to be preferable to a few, individual redundancies or, worse, no jobs at all because the company couldn't balance the books.

Right now, most especially with a new CEO in place, the Lab has an ideal opportunity to be frank about changes which, ultimately, may not benefit all residents.  There's nothing wrong with saying, "I know we always did it this way, but it's expensive and unsustainable, potentially risking the failure of the company and thereby the demise of SL."

What is wrong, is to sneak things in without communication or explanation and expect there to be no speculation (including completely wrong conjecture).  That's the way the Lab has seemed to do things during my 4+ years as a resident.

You see, in my opinion, the Lab must start to more openly communicate the changes it makes.  It would result in benefits to them if they did: blogs might rant disagreement, but at least they'd not be full of conjecture, conspiracy theory and people moaning about having a toy taken away because they don't understand why.  I mean, you can reason with a 4yo child they must give you their teddy bear, to free-up their hands to eat, so why ignore the unspoken "why?" from adults?