Challenge 10 – Consciousness, Complexity, Causality & Change

It is hard to give up our beliefs.?

It is hard because we have invested our time in them like attending University or reputed training programmes and reading blogs & books by authority figures .

Through the process of Bayesian Updating (watch the video here to find out how this happens ) what we believe in not only determines how we see the world now but what we believe in the future. ?We become a self-fulfilling prophecy – our beliefs and behaviours become highly predictable and causal because we are looking for evidence that keeps our reality alive.

So when we challenge our beliefs, we challenge our reality.

Back to the Future

But if we take a trip back in time we can see how beliefs about Organisational Change have been skewed away from viewing change as a complex human process based on science to one aimed of oversimplifications to provide 'cognitive candy' and quick fixes for time-pressed executives.

According to Brighman & Cummings change management moved away from established Organisational Development practice and research in the early 80’s. They don’t elaborate on why but I suspect that people were seduced by the quick fixes that books such as ‘In Search of Excellence’ were offering.?

During the 60-70's humanistic psychology was all the rage arguing that human motivation was driven by complex internal motivators such as autonomy, efficacy & relatedness – but this died a death as it became associated with hippy culture which wasn’t suitable for the business environment.?Organisational Development was replaced with a more mechanistic linear approach with proliferation of n-step models in the 80-90’s . A throwback to Taylor’s scientific management .

But, after over 50 years of high-quality evidence produced by Organisational Development contradicting our popular beliefs, maybe it is time to reconsider our assumptions??If we don’t then Organisational Change becomes an ideology and potentially a pseudoscience which damages our reputation as practitioners.

Adopting a Scientific Mindset

Adopting a more scientific mindset in Organisational Change would be nothing new .???Lewin stated that his Field Theory was a

“method for analysing causal relationships & building scientific constructs”

and Carl Rogers though that

“though science is slow and fumbling, it represents the best road we know to truth, even in so delicately intricate an area as that of human relationships.”

I think if we followed evidence over ideology then organisational change would be in a different place.?We would be able to quickly update beliefs ?creating a more agile & trustworthy practice.?We would start to adopt psychological constructs that gave us deep insights into how organisations develop change capability.?

Change Management Challenges Revisited

In the first of my Change Management Challenges , I suggested that popular approaches to organisational change do not start in the right place.?If we begin change with understanding four key areas of organisational capability (individual cognitive & behavioural capability and organisational systems and support) rather than urgency (Kotter) or awareness (Prosci), organisations have a better chance of change success.?A model more aligned to the Emery & Trist ?Birk & Letwin (systems approach) than an linear n-step approach.

I wondered whether there were any other gaps in popular approaches to Organisational Change and there were – lots! ?For example, few approaches focus on identifying the problem the change is trying to solve, and even fewer emphasise promoting change-related knowledge or reinforcement of the change.

This prompted me to go a step further and explore the reliability and validity of the evidence claiming to support these approaches.?I concluded that there was a lack of scientific rigour in approaches to Organisations Change, which opens the doors to folk law, fiction, fads and myths that undermine our practice.

There was some pushback (resistance to change ??) from practitioners, and the arguments started to get a bit more philosophical.?People challenged my articles with the following comments .

In response, I wrote two further articles - ?one outlining different levels of claims from just bad science to plain BS and another on what it means to adopt a scientific mindset in organisational change .?I also had some thoughts on how practitioners could spot dodgy concepts (part 1 and part 2 ).?Here is a summary .

In parallel, I was writing my MythBusters series .?One particularly dominant myth is that ‘brains hate change’.?This assumption (mental model) seems to drive our practices’ obsession with resistance using neuroscience to justify articles and books on the neuroscience of Organisational Change.?These are extraordinary extrapolations .?We cannot scale experiments on the brain to theories about how organisations change any more than we can use the physics of water molecules to define ‘wetness’ or run experiments on starlings' brains to understanding their murmuration s – we just get lost in the complexity.?It would seem a futile exercise, particularly given that it just takes three simple rules to stimulate a murmuration .?It seems complex systems are causal, predictable and rely on reductive explanations.

What Neuroscience really tells us about individual change

My article on learning to love organisational change gives an alternative (I think more accurate) assessment of what neuroscience tells us about how we respond to change - the importance of creating curiosity.?Neuroscience suggests that we react to different types of change in different ways depending on how much we know about the probabilities and outcomes of the change.?That seems to be how our brains work, best guessing (Bayesian Updating ) our reality to build a repertoire of strategies to deal with future uncertainty which helps to safeguard our wellbeing .?Of all the articles I wrote, these two on uncertainty and stress (getting the basics right and bootstrapping our beliefs ) have been the most difficult so far.

And finally, I deep dived into what comes first- beliefs or behaviours??There seems to be a strong belief in organisational change that it is all about changing ‘hearts and minds’.?This article challenges that it shouldn't be. It also challenges Schein’s iceberg interpretation of organisational culture.?Apparently even Schein thinks the iceberg analogy is wrong and suggests it more like a lily pond – a complex ecosystems approach to change.?The article presents a view that organisational change is more effective when we experiment with new behaviours rather than focussing on changing beliefs.?This view contradicts the current growth mindset approach to changing organisational culture .

If the conditions are right - just do it!

Maybe the best way to change our assumptions about what we can or can’t do is just try to do it!?So the challenge of Organisational Change is how do we create conditions where people feel they can try things out.?Viewing organisational change in this way shifts the emphasis from traditional top-down approach focussed on episodic change programmes to an ongoing process of building internal change capability that potentially helps organisations meet any external challenge.

I found it interesting that Kurt Lewin (the father of organisational change) thought that the 'tension' between an individual’s current (prior) knowledge and their goal (future ‘posterior’ state) were the critical drivers for human motivation or change. ?Again this is Bayesian Updating in action.?The ‘tension’ is an uncertainty, a judgement call – can I do this??It is a likelihood of success - a probability or inference of cause to effect.?This led me to further investigate our brains reaction to uncertainty here and here .?

It seems rather than characterising our reactions to uncertainty and change as ‘fight or flight’ or ‘amyglada hyjacks’ a more accurate view of change is our our ability to find a strategy to preserve our future wellbeing.?For organisations and change practitioners this means habituating change by constantly challenging prior beliefs (#myths , assumptions, biases and heuristics) with the best available evidence and #criticalthinking.

Maybe this is what Lewin meant when he mentioned the unfreeze-change-refreeze model – an early model of Bayesian Updating?

This brings me be back to being humanistic.?That an evidence-based approach not only helps our brains to build a more adaptive and trustworthy view of the world but it also is more humanistic. ?If we base our beliefs on myths (disproven theories) then we are not helping to build organisations where people can flourish and grow – we are building organisations where decisions are based on the strongest ideology not the strongest evidence.

Where do we go from here??

If, as Anil Seth suggests, “Our consciousness experiences of the world around us, and of ourselves within it, happen with, through and because of our living bodies” (Seth, A. 2021.?Being you: A new science of consciousness. Penguin.p 174) then human are open complex adaptive systems.?Our beliefs and behaviours are formed by our environment and we form our environment though our beliefs and behaviours.?We are inseparable from nature, our context.?

So over the next couple of weeks I will be exploring whether we can view Organisational Change though the lens of complex systems.?Maybe this will give us a more solid basis for our Organisational Change practice – after all the founding thinkers thought it would .?