Potential for Change

When my grade ten public examination results came out, I had topped my class.

This should have been a clean, uncomplicated moment of joy. And in some part of me, it was — I had studied with genuine ambition, had quietly aimed for the national topper list, had wanted, in that particular way that invisible children sometimes want things, to be the kind of person whose name appears in a newspaper. I settled for school topper. The elation was real.

But what followed was not what I expected. The disbelief in the faces of the people around me — family, peers, teachers — was so total that it began to work on me. I had been, until that point, the child who was good at dancing. Academically invisible. Getting by. Nobody’s idea of a topper. And here were the people who knew me best, looking at the results as though there had been an administrative error.

There is a particular difficulty in having to re-examine yourself in the light of other people’s inability to update their picture of you. The result was in my hands. The evidence was not ambiguous. And yet the weight of accumulated perception — this is who you are, this is what you are capable of — pressed hard enough that I had to consciously resist it. I had to choose to believe the evidence over the story.

A few years later, I would be praised in an engineering college for the quality of my writing in English — a language I could not construct a single sentence in, independently, until I was fifteen. Speaking it had not even been imagined. Before I had language for neuroplasticity, I had lived it. Before I could name the science, I had the proof in my own history.

What those experiences gave me — and what no amount of theoretical reading could have substituted for — was a foundational, embodied conviction: that what you are today is not a fixed report on what you are capable of becoming.

The belief beneath the surface

Potential for change, as a mindset, stems from a single conviction: we are evolving beings. Not metaphorically. Not aspirationally. Constitutively. Change is not something that happens to us under exceptional circumstances — it is the nature of what we are. The question is not whether we will change, but whether we will participate consciously in the direction of that change, or be changed by default by whatever forces are acting on us.

This sounds straightforward. It is, in practice, one of the most contested beliefs in organisational life.

Running beneath the surface of most institutional cultures is a counter-belief that is rarely stated explicitly but is constantly enacted: that people are, in the essential ways that matter, already formed. That the person in front of you is, more or less, the person they will remain. That first impressions contain something true and durable about character. That one significant failure is a reliable indicator of future performance. That potential is something you either have or you don’t, and the job of the institution is to identify and select for it, not to cultivate it.

This counter-belief does not survive scrutiny. But it doesn’t need to survive scrutiny to remain powerful. It just needs to remain unexamined — which, in most organisations, it does.

What this mindset makes possible

When you genuinely hold the belief that people are evolving beings — when it is not a value statement on a wall but a lived operating assumption — several things become possible that were not available before.

The first is kindness. Not the performative kindness of corporate wellness programmes, but a functional, structural kindness toward self and others that flows from the belief that growth is ongoing and error is instructive. If the person in front of me is capable of being different tomorrow than they are today — and I am equally capable of it — then a single shortcoming does not become the whole story. A fall is not a verdict. It is an event in a longer arc whose conclusion has not yet been written.

One of the most corrosive patterns in organisational life is the way a mistake calcifies into a person’s identity in the institutional imagination. They become the person who. The label sticks. And once it sticks, the institution stops creating conditions for the thing to be different, which makes it much less likely to become different, which confirms the label. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it runs quietly in the background of most talent management conversations.

The second is intrinsic motivation. All of the language around genuine, self-sustaining motivation — the kind that doesn’t require constant external incentive — only makes sense if there is an underlying belief that effort leads to growth, and that growth is both possible and worthwhile. Strip out that belief, and what remains is compliance: people doing what is required of them because the incentive structure demands it, not because they feel genuinely invested in becoming better. The difference in energy, creativity, and resilience between these two states is not marginal. It is the difference between an organisation that is alive and one that is merely functioning.

The third is curiosity about the new. A leader who believes that people — including themselves — are capable of change approaches new models, new challenges, and new environments with fundamentally different energy than one who does not. The unfamiliar is not a threat to an existing identity. It is an invitation to extend the self.

The pattern across history

The belief in potential for change has a long, recurring, historical pattern behind it. It is not optimism. It is a pattern that keeps reasserting itself across centuries and contexts, often in the face of exactly the kind of institutional scepticism that dismisses it.

John Dewey insisted that education was not the filling of a vessel but the cultivation of a living mind. Gandhi shaped his entire life and movement on the conviction that ordinary people — farmers, weavers, people who had been systematically told they were without power — carried within them the capacity for moral agency and transformative action. The Moved by Love movement driven by Vinoba Bhave carried this further: walking across India, redistributing land not through legislation but through the gradual, person-by-person work of awakening generosity and changing minds from the inside out.

These examples share a common architecture: they began not with a masterplan but with a conviction, held by a small number of people, that what existed was not the only possibility — and that the gap between what was and what could be was crossable, even if the path was not yet visible.

The discernment this mindset demands

Here is where I want to add something that most writing on change leaves out, because leaving it out produces a picture that is not only incomplete but potentially harmful.

The belief in potential for change, applied without discernment, can become a sophisticated tool for maintaining broken systems.

Consider the education system. There is a widespread narrative that the system is broken, and that the task is to fix it — improve curriculum, improve teacher training, improve infrastructure, improve assessment. But what if the education system that emerged from the industrial era was designed with great precision to produce a particular kind of human being — obedient, trained in narrow competencies, habituated to compliance — and has been succeeding at that purpose with remarkable consistency for over a century? In that reading, the system is not broken. It is working. And the effort to improve it from within may be doing nothing more than making a well-designed machine run more smoothly toward an outcome that was never compatible with human flourishing in the first place.

The belief in potential for change must be accompanied by the capacity to ask: change toward what, and within what structure? There are situations where what is called for is not perseverance and improvement but a fundamental breaking down — a willingness to let the old form dissolve so that something genuinely new can emerge. Pouring faith and energy into improving the wrong vessel is not an act of hope. It is a way of avoiding the more difficult and more necessary question of what vessel is actually needed.

Vinoba Bhave did not work to improve the land tenure system. He worked to dissolve the conditions that made it seem immovable. Gandhi did not seek incremental improvements in colonial administration. The Transition Network does not try to make the existing energy economy more efficient.

The perseverance that this mindset calls for is real and demanding. But it must be directed with discernment. Hold the faith where the potential for genuine change exists. Have the clarity to let go — and sometimes to actively disrupt — where the system’s purpose is itself the problem.

What leaders need to stop believing

The belief that first impressions are last impressions is almost ubiquitous in senior leadership, and it is almost never examined. It operates not as a conscious position but as an unspoken habit of attention: we look for evidence that confirms what we already believe about a person and discount evidence that contradicts it. We call this pattern experience and judgement. It is, much of the time, neither.

There is also a more subtle belief that needs surfacing: that wisdom flows in one direction. That the people at the top of the hierarchy hold the analysis, and the people most affected by decisions hold only the problems to be solved. That the change-maker is the one with the advanced degree and the strategic mandate, and the community member, the frontline worker, the person whose life is directly shaped by the policy being designed in the boardroom — they are the beneficiaries of expertise, not its holders.

This belief is one of the primary reasons why well-resourced, well-intentioned interventions fail to produce the change they were designed for. The knowledge that would have made the difference was there all along — just not in the people the institution thought to consult.

Cultivating the mindset: from concept to practice

Begin with your own evidence. Before you can hold the belief in others’ potential for change, you need to have encountered it in yourself. Look honestly at your own history and identify the moments where you became genuinely different. Most people have this evidence. They simply haven’t treated it as data.

Change the grammar of your evaluations. The language of performance management is grammatically static. It describes states. Shifting to a grammar of trajectory changes what becomes visible: not where this person is, but the direction they are moving and at what pace.

Create brave spaces rather than safe spaces. A safe space promises the absence of discomfort. A brave space acknowledges that real growth involves discomfort and commits to holding that discomfort with care, without judgement, and with genuine curiosity about what is on the other side of it.

Develop the discernment to distinguish between improving a system and replacing it. Ask, regularly and seriously: is this system failing at its purpose, or succeeding at the wrong purpose? The answer changes everything about where you direct your energy.

Extend patience as a structural commitment, not just a personal virtue. The change that matters is slow. It happens in months and years, not in quarters. An organisation that genuinely believes in the potential for change builds its timelines and evaluation cycles accordingly.

The divinity argument

The belief in potential for change is, at its root, a belief in the inherent goodness of beings — in the idea that underneath whatever has calcified or contracted or gone wrong, there is something worth reaching for. That the person who is underperforming, the colleague who is stuck, the leader who has lost their way — they are not reducible to the version of themselves that is currently visible. There is more there.

When a leader operates from that belief — when they look at the people in their sphere and see not a fixed report but an ongoing possibility — the entire quality of their leadership changes. Not as a technique. As a truth they are living from.

And that, more than any framework or methodology, is what makes change happen.