Desperation and Aspiration

I have been stuck in the theory for as far back as I can remember that the only reason people and institutions change is because they are desperate. I mean, that basically sums up the way I change. Peter Senge's thoughts, in his afterword to the 25th Anniversary edition of Robert Greenleaf's Servant Leadership, were a breath of inspiration to me:

There's an old saw, that there are only two fundamental sources of change in human affairs: aspiration and desperation. We are familiar with the phrase, "Nothing will ever change unless there is a crisis." That's desperation. As far as I can see, the number one leadership strategy in America is quite simple to describe: Create a crisis. Or if you're really clever, create the fear that a crisis is about to hit. That shows the extent to which we have allowed the diminishment for our capacity for aspiration.

Aspiration drives virtually all fundamental learning. Why did we learn to walk? Why did we learn to talk? Why did we learn anything that we consider really significant in our lives? Did we suddenly wake up one morning at the age of eight months and say, "Oh my gosh, my life is never going to turn out. I'm going to be a total loser if I don't learn to walk!" Or, did we learn to walk because we wanted to? That's aspiration. Just imagine: What if ninie out of ten change initiatives, in our organizations or in our societies, were driven by excitement, by the idea that this would serve somebody in a different way, that this would give us a better way of living? This would be very different from crisis and fear, our current primary motivators for change.