3 principles of change: Why you're wired for but struggling to embrace it

One of my core beliefs about change is that we're hard wired to be able to change. But we seem to keep getting in our own way, making change difficult to respond to and even harder to drive.

Today, let's explore why that is!

As I mentioned in our introductory article, my perception of change is influenced by a lot of things, many of which have nothing to do with the more formal disciplines I'm trained in. I've spent time studying different behaviour change frameworks and have read my fair share of pop-psychology books and scientific literature. However, to a much greater extent, my view of change mirrors what I, like many before me, see in the natural world. I've studied it in the human body as a biomedical scientist, I've observed it in my garden, I've seen it in people in my corporate life facilitating complex change projects for companies and have watched it in animals, family and friends in my personal one.

Over the years, this has led me to build my understanding of change and our response to it around three principles.

Principle #1: Every living thing is striving for an unattainable state of sustained balance resulting in an eternal dance of ongoing adjustments and changes.

Whether you call it harmony, equilibrium, balance or something totally different, in this regard, my observations reflect Newton's third law:

"For every action in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction."

As balance, if ever achieved is never sustained for very long, it supports the theory of ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus who in observing this constant state of movement noted that "Change is the only constant".

It really doesn't matter how small or big the living thing is or how slowly or quickly the change happens. It doesn't even matter if it's a cyclical occurrence or a seemingly random event, change is constantly happening everywhere we look. Whether you look at the changing seasons and the transition from new green buds to fallen leaves, the cycle of birth and death, the movement of water and minerals in and out of a cell, the constant adjustment of hormone levels in the body or even the evolution of animals like Galapagos finches, change is constantly happening.

What's more interesting is the constant dance at play. Something will challenge whatever exists in that moment, forcing it to respond to the change catalyst and adjust itself as the two try to find a new state of harmony.

• The weather cools and the food supply shrinks so the bears change their behaviour and go hibernate through the winter.
• The water vanishes and the desert frog buries itself and goes to sleep until the rains come back.
• If the salt concentration in a cell exceeds the concentration outside of the cell, osmosis will move the salts around to re-balance. Or if waste products build up in your cells, autophagy in the cell will break down the waste products and ship them off.

No matter how hard you try, eventually there will be a change in something contributing to a state of balance and adjustment will be required.

Principle #2: All living things respond automatically to external change catalysts, except us.

If everything in the natural world is constantly changing, why is it that every other living creature seems able to adapt to change (or admittedly die) with greater ease than us?

My hypothesis here is that every living creature has an almost fixed internal state. It runs on a system of if...then rules that mean that while every animal and plant will respond to change, the way they will do so is determined by their own internal programming. Some things will get the same response from all animals of a kind (ie if it gets too hot, a reptile will seek shade so it doesn't cook itself to death) while others will be specific to the individual creature (ie an aggressive dog will fight back when threatened, a timid one may shrink into the corner or run off). Even we have this wiring at a species level when responding to danger. Most people when they see a tsunami approaching will run away to avoid drowning (there are of course the special few hard wired to run towards danger) and then there are things like reflex responses such as moving your hands away from a burning stove or being unable to keep your eyes open when you sneeze (yes it's a thing).

But while other creatures may have personalities that shape how they as individuals respond to a catalyst, humans seem to have evolved past this point. We seem able to override our programming and choose a different option rather than just relying on our programming or instinct. We have the free will and conscious ability to change the rules.

This evolutionary advantage did wonders in tribal days because it allowed us to dilute the burden of responding to each and every danger and instead share them with those around us. Needed a nap? No worries, someone else can keep watch over the camp in case a lion comes prowling. Fell and injured yourself? Someone will stay near you and share their food so you don't starve. It really was wonderful. All you had to do was override your impulses on occasion and do what others would expect of you for the common good. It's effectively the premise of Simon Sinek's book Leaders Eat Last, but my premise is that not only did we give the leader the better food, we also gave up a little piece of ourselves in exchange for a degree of safety we could never attain on our own. And it was absolutely a worthwhile trade.

Which leads to principle number 3...

Principle #3: Our change strategy in the modern world is getting in the way of our ability to respond to and drive change effectively

In situations like the above, a little self-compromising was really a no brainer because keeping yourself alive was far more important than a bit of inner conflict. However, if you look at the types of changes that we face today and the number of changes we face, it becomes clear quite quickly that our strategy of self sacrifice and overriding our internal compass in exchange for protection isn't really yielding the benefits it should.

The world we live in now is nothing like the one our strategies for dealing with change were designed for. The threats we perceive come at us from every angle and vary for each person. The sheer volume of stimuli and the number of decisions we need to make every single day (~35,000) are too overwhelming for a small group to handle, let alone any individual on their own. Unfortunately, we have no choice since we can't just rely on others to respond to most of the changes for us. So we've found a workaround....internal delegation.

Our conscious brain may not be able to make ~35,000 decisions a day but our subconscious finds greater volumes easier to manage. It is far more efficient at designing if...then behavioural responses for us when a new change catalyst appears. The subconscious brain however, can only do what it does without totally depleting your energy supply by taking a few shortcuts and making a few assumptions while piecing together patterns to tell you how to respond. These are the biases and heuristics so many people are becoming more and more familiar with.

The problem with delegating so many of our responses to change is that the patterns and experiences upon which the subconscious builds rules may not accurately reflect the situation you're now facing. But your subconscious doesn't care because its primary objective is to keep you alive and get you away from (perceived) danger, not necessarily to do what is in your greatest good. This means that the most efficient approach when mapping to a pattern is to give more attention to anything that was a threat, danger or problem that you experienced in the past and to prioritise these events over anything positive or contradictory.

As you can probably guess, this leaves many of us in the following predicament which I believe is the reason so many people today have such a negative view of change and struggle so much with change in their own lives.

1. We keep compromising more and more and ignoring how we want to respond (internal stability) in order to act in a way that we think the group wants us to in the hope that the pack will step up and lessen the number of changes we need to deal with individually.
2. We delegate whatever decisions we can to our subconscious to conserve energy and reduce mental fatigue, even though this approach is riddled with biases and heuristics which left unchecked may cause problems and lead us away from solutions and responses to change that could be of greater benefit.
3. The more we compromise the internal self, the more we create incongruence (inner conflict) and a need to compensate ourselves for the discomfort of betraying our inner compass in order to just keep going. We're no longer just fighting the outer battle of responding to external change catalysts but also the inner one of trying to stay internally stable enough to keep going (which in itself is unsustainable and often leads to burnout and inability to cope with change).

So there you have it, my very high level views on why we're no longer equipped to handle change. What do you think? Do you agree/disagree? Does some of it resonate but not other parts? I'd love to hear your thoughts so please share your comments below!

What's coming next:

If you want to know how to change a situation, you need to know what can/can't be changed and how things interact with each other. So the next topic we'll be covering will explore different types of change levers and how they contribute to the stickiness and stability of a change!