Science: the villain of business change

Tell me if this sounds familiar. Your organization has an important transformation but it’s a lot harder to affect than you expected – even if there isn’t a choice or the upside is enormous. It doesn’t make sense. We all know change isn’t “easy” but why is it SO hard? You’re doing communications and training, so why isn’t it working?

Why is it taking so long? Why is everyone still resisting? Where is my ROI?!

Science. Blame science. Well, “the science” to be more specific. Humans literally evolved to be the problem when your organization needs to transform. But if you can understand this most fundamental roadblock, you can easily sail around it and swiftly achieve your business goals and associated growth of your bottom line. No PhD required.

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Change is uncomfortable

First, you must understand two truths. 1) Most people like change. Think about it – most people want progress and improvement. But…2) most people don’t like being changed. The idea of improvement (change) is enticing but going through it, not so much. Why? The current state is comfortable, regardless of how dysfunctional, because it is familiar (ask my wife how difficult it was to convince me to buy a new couch). People may not feel that connection to comfort until someone tries to take away the familiarity. Nevertheless, it is there. Change is, by definition, uncomfortable and people resist or evade discomfort – mostly subconsciously. Is this smooth-talking consulting nonsense? Nope, it’s science.

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Nature’s roadblock to change

The human brain has a pre-frontal cortex and basal ganglia (and other stuff, you can Google it). The former handles higher-level functioning, the latter hard-wired reactions. One ideally wants the pre-frontal cortex handling important business (like corporate business, which it usually does). But its processing capacity is limited and requires significant energy. When something like transformational change occurs, for most stakeholders it can be overwhelming to the brain and processing shifts to the basal ganglia. Fight-or-flight takes over. When a human shifts from comfort to discomfort, they fight back or run away because that’s how our brains are supposed to work.

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Use The Force, not force

People are biologically created to make change harder. If you try to force it, you’ll suffer attrition, which trades institutional knowledge for the high cost of recruitment and training, and low morale, which drops productivity. Is there any hope for organizations who need change, and don’t have endless time and money to spend on it?!

Yes, The Force! If you could just make people change, the problem would be solved. We aren’t in a galaxy far, far away. But thankfully Obi-Wan Kenobi is not our only hope. This is where strategic OCM – what I call Organizational Readiness – saves the day.

One last quick bit of science. Current State is a series of habits (behavior regardless of written policy and procedure) that exist via neural pathways in the brain. To change, we need new habits AND must overcome the natural human reaction to revert. Old habits, when left to fester, will outweigh the new ones 100-to-1. Proper OCM supports forming new neurological connections that overwrite the old behavior.

An OCM practitioner’s version of the Force is executed through transforming underlying behaviors, getting people to shift their own habits and thus dramatically increasing their ability and desire to adopt the change. Strategic application of OCM reduces the processing shift to the basal ganglia and edits the neural pathways: you address their motivations then they are more comfortable changing on their own. It’s an extra step from a Jedi’s handwave but just as effective when done properly. But (there’s always a but), you can’t change what you don’t see! And that’s where most efforts to change go astray.

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As clear as water

Anthropologist Ralph Linton pointed out, “The last thing a fish would ever notice would be water.” Water is so fundamental and ever-present to fish that they don’t even notice it. If you tried to get a fish to change her water, she’d likely respond, “what water?” You know, if fish could talk.

The hardest part of changing something is identifying it in the first place. Organizations have many written policies, procedures, and expectations. But ways of working, the behavior of its members (the water!), usually do not match them. Most leaders target change effort toward what’s supposed to be happening:

“They’re supposed to be designing that way and we need them to instead do it this way.” This is a move from point A (where leaders think the organization is) to point B (the future). Change leaders think to focus here.

True and swift OCM addresses what’s ACTUALLY happening: the habits. This means the change effort should occur from a different and unexpected direction:

“They’re actually designing that way; we need them to do it this way.” This is a move from point C (where stakeholders actually are) to point B.

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Harness the science

We’ve learned to spend effort identifying the organization’s behavior to open your project up to progress. But how do you do that, especially without spending endless hours and budget investigating? Among other tactics, I use the Paradigm Prism Workshop to help leaders visualize entrenched and usually unrecognized habits, not stated feelings or policy.

Like a light Prism, this one-time, facilitated event uncovers and separates out the various organizational habits related to your transformation goals and allows for the surgical removal of counterproductive habits without collateral damage or unnecessary time/cost. The Prism determines what would shift stakeholder thinking away from the pre-frontal cortex and how to approach editing the neural pathways. It pairs with the project effort to design Future State so the discomfort can be minimized and to accelerate the journey from Current State to ROI. And it takes significantly less time and money than the survey/interview approach most consultants employ.

Want to see if the Prism is what your organization needs to “unstuck” your transformation and make the science work for you? Let’s chat on how OCM can save your organization pain and money while accelerating the time to ROI for your next change.