A Moral Foundations Theory approach to change management.

Change management is a discipline that most of us in the Agile world know something about, but which is too often an afterthought. And, in my (and many other folks’ experience) it doesn’t give us a solid, repeatable path to success.

At the Business Agility conference last year, one speaker (I can’t find his name!) brought Jonathan Haidt’s concept of ‘the elephant and the rider’ to change management.

I’m a giant Haidt fan. His books are among the ones I’ve read that gave me new and valuable frames for complex problems.

Haidt says: “We are emotional actors! We are highly intuitive beings who act first, and justify later. Our beliefs, convictions, and values are far less ‘rational’ than we imagine.”

Kyle Roberts describes this:

“Haidt provides the helpful metaphor of the rider and the elephant. The rider is the conscious mind with its rational functions and volitional power. But the elephant is everything else: all the internal presuppositions, genetic inclinations, subconscious motives, and layers upon layers of uninterrogated, raw experience. Needless to say, the elephant is bigger (more powerful) than the rider.

As the rider responding to the elephant, our reasoning process has become well adjusted to the seemingly always-urgent task of justifying our deeper, always latent moral intuitions. Using another analogy, Haidt suggests that human minds are more comparable to lawyers and public relations consultants than they are to scientists who “objectively” seek the truth, whatever the implications of the conclusion. Our minds are well-adapted to providing?post hoc?justifications or explanations for the moral convictions, “intuitions” that we already possess.”

Change management, as we practice it today, is deeply focused on the rider, and too often ignores the far more powerful elephant.

What I’m proposing is that we use the CM tools we have to both address the rider and structure the process – but that we frame the change in the context of the things that matter to the elephant.

Haidt’s research brings him to six dimensions of ‘elephant management’:

1.?????Care

2.?????Fairness

3.?????Loyalty

4.?????Liberty

5.?????Authority

6.?????Sanctity

These aspects unite us in that we pay attention to them, but they can divide us in how we prioritize them.

The tl;dr of what I’m suggesting is that we structure change management campaigns (because I see them as campaigns) with careful attention to each of these.

Let’s talk about what that looks like.

We’re launching a change campaign to do [thing].

How do we demonstrate to people they are being fairly treated?

How do we demonstrate care for the concerns and impacts the change will bring?

How do we give people some degrees of freedom to shape the change that impacts them?

How do we call on their loyalty and demonstrate the organization’s loyalty to them?

How do we appropriately use authority to direct the change?

And finally, how do we proceed in a way that doesn’t trip over people’s feelings of what’s immoral.

As I play out scenarios where campaigns contain these kinds of themes, I can envision a campaign where we use AKDAR as a frame for the rider; we manage change capacity with care; and we address the visceral impacts of change in a unified and coordinated way.