QUICK GUIDE: WHY CHANGE IS HARD, YET EASY!

by Carla Thompson, Founder and Coach at Agent+ Coaching

 

Change is hard! In The Neuroscience of Leadership, David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz share that in many studies of patients who have undergone coronary bypass surgery, only one in nine people, on average, adopts healthier day-to- day habits.

These patients clearly understand that their lives are at risk. And yet they don’t change.

So what about changing the way a whole organization behaves?

Why do leadership efforts and organizational change initiatives fall flat?

There is an art to leadership of course and there is also a science, as proven through the recent studies of the brain.

Why is change hard?

Much of what we do daily is routine, and routine is built on habits. When we have internalized how to do things, we consider the behavior habitual. And we like operating habitually because it requires less energy.

In Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, we learn that from a survival standpoint, our bodies are actually designed to use as little energy as possible throughout the day to make sure that by the end of the day, we still have enough energy to live! So we like habits!

Rock and Schwartz share that trying to change any hardwired habit requires a lot of effort, in the form of attention. This often leads to people feeling uncomfortable. So what do leaders do? They don’t want people to feel uncomfortable!

Also, there’s a part of your brain called the amygdala, that activates when you sense things are not right somehow. This part of your brain creates error detection; it signals powerful messages that something is wrong. The capacity for higher thought is decreased when your amygdala is activated.

Change amplifies stress and discomfort. Many leaders are managing change within an or business weekly if not daily. Leaders may greatly underestimate how much physical distress people are experiencing! At the same time, leaders may not realize that their people are so incredibly stressed and therefore, having a hard time accessing their pre-frontal cortexes where higher level thinking occurs. Instead, under great stress, people make mistakes and have emotional reactions.

We have learned a great about behaviorism, mostly that the “carrot and stick” plans to affect change rarely succeed in the long run. Sadly, while incentives and threats rarely work, this behaviorist model still seems to be the dominant paradigm in many organizations.