Battling The Walls of Denial

One of the problems change agents face is promoting change when individuals, teams, and even organizations fail to recognize how their behavior hurts them and therefore don’t see the need for change. In these circumstances, you often hear fatalistic rationalizations such as, “This is just how we always do it.” Or the equally problematic, “You just don’t understand; we are special.” As Jeremy Willets and I have recognized even though work intake is a serious issue that can cripple organizations and teams, people have built solid walls of fatalism and rationalizations to reduce the inner conflict their behavior generates. As noted during our re-read of How To Be A Stoic, most people hate conflict. To rectify the conflict, they seek explanations to push an idea or judgment over the equal hump. This means that rational arguments and promises of greater value almost always fall on deaf ears. Unfortunately, this is the tactic change agents typically deploy - it is ineffective. To affect change a leader needs to change the playing field. Increasing cognitive dissonance is a valuable tool. Increasing cognitive dissonance generates conflict between judgments that a person holds. For example, I need to please my boss even though they are piling too much on my plate. I have heard this example used to rationalize creating technical debt to get through a backlog. One person once told me that technical debt must be ok because we have a word for it. This was before I studied Stoiscm, I pointed out that we had a word for murder but that did not make it all right. I got a “you are so stupid” stare so I stopped my verbal sparing. They had told themselves stories that helped them sleep at night and were willing to defend that position even though harmful to themselves and their organization.?

As a change agent in this common scenario, a laissez-faire approach to facilitating change will fail more times than it succeeds. A more manipulative approach (yeah, I know) needs to be considered. In its simplest form at a team level, the pattern is:

1. Isolate the team (Dojos are a way to create isolation)
2. Generate cognitive dissonance?
3. Introduce new information the team can use to reduce cognitive dissonance
4. Coach them through using the new knowledge
5. Release the team into the wild?

This approach feels heavy-handed and manipulative. While discussing the topic a colleague asked if I had been reading books by Fredrick Taylor and Jack Walsh. Hystryonics aside, as I re-read Jess Brock’s The Dojo Coach’s Pocket Guide I don’t see a substantial difference in approaches –direct and controlled, yes, negatively manipulative, no.?

Generating cognitive dissonance is the part of this equation people have the most difficulty with. As a change agent or coach it is easy to help when a team recognizes they are on a burning platform. They have pain and want to get rid of that pain. This is the classic burning platform scenario that almost every class on change teaches. In real life, recognition is often the real barrier to change. As we have noted when people have rationalized their position, logical arguments aren't effective in these cases. generating cognitive dissonance can be useful. The idea is to create a state of mental discomfort that motivates individuals to resolve inconsistencies between their beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors. Approaches for generating dissonance include:

1. Awareness of Inconsistencies: Highlighting discrepancies between current beliefs and new information or behaviors makes individuals more aware of their contradictions. This awareness can spark a desire to change beliefs or adopt new behaviors to reduce discomfort.
2. Encouraging Reflection: Increased cognitive dissonance can lead individuals to reflect more deeply on their beliefs and the rationalizations that support them. This introspection can open the door to new perspectives and facilitate a change in opinion.
3. Motivating Change: When faced with dissonance, individuals may feel compelled to minimize discomfort by aligning their beliefs with their actions or accepting new ideas. New, compelling information helps to change the playing field.
4. Reinforcing New Information: By introducing information that conflicts with existing beliefs, cognitive dissonance can encourage individuals to reassess and adopt a new standpoint to remove the dissonance.
5. Empathy Development: Engaging individuals in discussions that challenge their views can enhance empathy and understanding by pushing them to consider alternative perspectives, potentially leading to attitude changes over time.
6. Behavioral Changes: When dissonance arises due to behaviors that clash with beliefs (such as someone who values work-life balance but does not want to say no to new work), the discomfort may motivate them to change their behaviors or beliefs to restore consistency.

In using these techniques, techniques that generate cognitive dissonance need to be closely facilitated. Events such as retrospectives, retreats, and dojos provide isolation and control to ensure team members who become defensive are channeled in the right direction. Or worse don’t end up strengthening existing beliefs. The goal is to facilitate an environment where individuals feel comfortable exploring and possibly reconsidering their views based on new information without feeling attacked.

Jeremy Willets and I have penned twenty questions that can be used to help generate cognitive dissonance in the area of work intake.? We will publish the questions in the Work Intake LinkedIn Group over the next few weeks (link). To jump the queue and get all 20 now, join our Maven Work Intake Class Mailing List and I will send you a copy.