…is surprisingly easy.
“We’ve done all this work and things haven’t gotten better,” so, apparently, we should stop trying and go back to what we were doing.
“We’ve done all this work and things are getting better,” so that means that there’s no need to keep trying and we can go back to what we were doing.
The status quo might not be ideal, but if we’re afraid of change, if we focus on the costs of doing the work to make things better, it’s tempting to simply stay still.
And the real fears of change are that it might work (which is scary) and that it might not work (which is heartbreaking).
Easier to do nothing and simply settle.