Challenge # 8 - What comes 1st - belief or behaviour?

Due to the formation of the "Chinese Soviet Republic", there was a lot of anti-Chinese sentiment in America in the 1930's. In 1934 Richard T. LaPiere took a road trip around the US with a Chinese couple. Unknown to his fellow travellers he took notes on how they were treated in hotels and restaurants. Only once were they denied service and he judged their level of customer service to be above average. LaPiere then wrote to 250 hotels and restaurants asking them if they would service Chinese guests. The answer from 90% of the owners was a resounding ‘NO’.

In this case the hotel and restaurant owners’ attitude towards or beliefs about Chinese people did not manifest itself in behaviour. What people say is not always what they do. There is a gap between intention and action.

Changing beliefs - the heart of organisation change theory?

The idea that beliefs, feelings, attitudes drive behaviour, action & outcomes is at the heart of organisational change theory. Organistional change is all about changing hearts and minds.

This is the basis of Edgar Schien's (the 'father' of organisational change management) model. In the classic iceberg metaphor behaviours (artifacts) lie above the 'waterline' and can be directly observed. Values and beliefs are just under the water and influence the way in which behaviours are manifested. Assumptions are much deeper and engrained; they are 'taken-for-granted' values and beliefs. Schien (1984) believed that assumptions are subconscious and can only be brought into the conscious through "a focussed inquiry" .

To really understand a culture and to ascertain more completely the group’s values and overt behavior, it is imperative to delve into the underlying assumptions, which are typically unconscious but which actually determine how group members perceive, think, and feel. Schien (1984)

This is a softer version of Schien's original conception of coercive persuasion which he felt was integral to change. He stated in 1962 that

“support for attitudes have to be undermined and destroyed if change is to take place”.

 A strong belief and extraordinary extrapolation from Chinese Communist Party prison camps (where Schien started his career interviewing POWs) to modern organisations and not dissimilar from Lewin’s Freeze-Change-Unfreeze model. We have to breakdown before we can build up.

This idea of exploring the unconscious to understand behaviours dates to Freud and Jung. They collected data on the ‘unconscious mind’ by asking people to talk about their dreams or encouraging clients to project their feelings onto their therapist (a technique called transference) believing that unconsciousness consisted of repressed thoughts which effect our behaviour and sometimes surface to the conscious through slips of the tough (a Freudian slip).

Jo Hatch extend Schien's work by introducing a circular dynamic between behaviours, beliefs and assumptions. Hatch argued that Schien's model "leaves open the question of the origin of assumptions". According to Hatch, Schien believed that assumptions come top-down from leaders by setting values - 'how it should be'. But Hatch argues that assumptions can also be formed directly from a leader's actions - they become symbolic - 'why it should be'. Employees interpret a leader's actions and form their own assumptions, values and behaviours. It is the culture (collective interpretation of a leader’s action) that determines the assumptions which manifests themselves as individual assumptions which in turn are realised as behaviours - these collective behaviours or organisational habits become symbolic. This is not just leadership dictating a new vision or set of values but collective action that changes assumptions.

Hatch's modification to Schien's model allowed behaviours to drive beliefs as well as beliefs driving behaviours.

In this 'bottom-up' process, just the hiring of a new leader can become symbolic and change people's assumptions about the organisation and beliefs about themselves. For example, in India, hiring a female leader had a significant impact on adolescent girls’ career aspirations and educational attainment. But it doesn't have to be leadership. Even small symbolic acts can have a big impact such as a simple "postcard intervention halved self-poisoning events and reduced psychiatric admissions by a third after 5 years". These interventions seem to be far more effective than changing aspirations or trying to change beliefs.

From visceral symbolic acts to simple nudges actions do speak louder than words.

What are beliefs?

Academics believe that there are two types of beliefs – implicit and explicit.   Implicit beliefs (maybe this is what Schien means by assumptions?) are beliefs that are deeply hidden in our subconscious and they are not necessarily endorsed by our 'true selves'.  When they conflict with our explicit beliefs (beliefs/attitudes held at a conscious level) we experience cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is experienced by a hotelier who is paid by a Chinese couple in the 1930's to stay in their hotel but then later says in a survey that they would never host Chinese customers. The racist hoteliers experience cognitive dissonance because the payments act as compensation for them acting at variance with their beliefs.  As Paul Gibbons says “when there is cognitive dissonance between beliefs and behaviour, it is the beliefs that give away, not the behaviours”

As a slight aside, cognitive dissonance theory suggests that having to deal with contradictory ideas is stressful and people strive for internal psychological consistency. Leon Festinger, who originally proposed the theory, studied under Kurt Lewin. So no surprise that cognitive dissonance fits neatly with Lewin’s idea of Force Field Analysis where forces work for and against change (resistance) – for change to be successful forces acting against change must we weakened. Hence organisational change’s fixation with resistance. We must breakdown before we can build up.

But then we have self-perception theory which suggest that implicit beliefs are weak and ambiguous so we can only find our ‘true selves’ by inferring them from our own behaviour. Self-perception theory suggests behaviour drives beliefs whereas cognitive dissonance suggests discrepancy between beliefs drive behaviours. In psychology the cognitive dissonance v self-perception theory debate has still not been resolved.

Founded on the idea of 'learned helplessness' Carol Dweck is the most famous proponent of the power of implicit theories. Her research examines children's beliefs (implicit theories) about intelligence. She found that those children who thought that intelligence was malleable were more persistent (worked harder) and performed better than those who did not. A child's academic performance could be improved by changing their beliefs about their intelligence. The belief amongst Dweck and her compatriots is:

“implicit theories of intelligence [mindsets] predict achievement” (Blackwell et al., 2007, p. 246)

But Dweck’s findings are far from conclusive and if adopting a growth mindset does predict achievement the affect is ‘very small near zero effect’.

But more fundamentally, is it working harder (a behaviour) that improves results or adopting a growth mindset (belief)? Clearly these are two different things and again comes to the heart of the debate - does hard work drive the belief or the belief drive the hard work?

Behaviours ------> Beliefs ----x---> Behaviours

So let’s get to the nub of this and answer the questions; is it beliefs ----> behaviour or behaviour ----> beliefs?

In my last article I mentioned the importance of self-efficacy on motivation. If beliefs do not drive behaviours, then self-efficacy beliefs do not drive motivation. And this meta-analysis (2013) suggests that they don't . This calls into question a whole body of research in this area from White's original conception to Bandura's work on self efficacy.  It potentially pulls the rug from under self determination theory (intrinsic motivation) and the theory of planned behaviour which are both built on the assumption that self-efficacy is one of the key predictors of behaviour.

And another meta-analytic (2018) study shows that the ability to achieve a behaviour is a significantly stronger predictor of self-efficacy than the reverse. The performance drives self-efficacy effect is 3x stronger than the efficacy driving performance effect. 

Simply put, it is "I achieve; therefore I believe" rather than "I believe; therefore I achieve".

Those with high levels of self-efficacy are those who have been consistently successful in the past. So a key moderator of current performance is our performance trajectory - we have all seen what happens to athletes or employees who lose their mojo! But as @Paul Berry explains here a simple behavioural intervention can help.

Another meta-analysis in 2019 on implicit beliefs found “that changes in implicit measures are possible, but those changes do not necessarily translate into changes in explicit measures or behaviour”.

As self-perception theory suggests, the evidence points to the effect of implicit beliefs on behaviour being pretty weak.

Psychologists are now starting to question their own beliefs. They are starting to question the idea that implicit beliefs and bias are a powerful driver of say academic performance or discrimination and even whether implicit and explicit beliefs are separate at all. Maybe we should also start to question the effectiveness of growth mindset interventions and  unconscious bias training?

Maybe, more fundamentally, as change management professionals, we should be constantly questioning our implicit beliefs in certain change theories and assumptions. I have argued in previous articles about the danger of believing in 'brains hate change' or 'resistance being something to overcome' or 'creating a sense of urgency'.

Same Same, But Different

Given these ever-changing times, we need to think of our organisational change world differently.

The central unifying concept within organisational change are Lewin’s linear steps starting with an ‘unfreezing’ of deep-rooted beliefs.  You need to break down before you can build up. These outdated mental models, stemming from the Freudian and Jungian notion of a sub-conscious self driving behaviour, are also used in Schien’s iceberg analogy of organisational change. The evidence does not support these models because the relationship between beliefs and behaviours is weak.

There are lots of changes going on in bodies every second. Internal conditions change but the system is still stable. The same goes for organisations.  There is no point when an organisation becomes static and unvarying – frozen in time. 

It is the change that keeps us stable. 

Organisations stay similar but never the same. Change as the stabiliser flips the traditional approach to organisational change – status quo is now the enemy making organisations vulnerable to external forces.  Change is not bookend by stability just more change.

The amorphous blob

This is where the amorphous blob analogy comes in... 

Change practitioners are not waiting by the side-lines waiting for an organisation to melt and become malleable. We understand organisations by touching them with our interventions (of course, following an evidence-based approach to choosing that intervention ??) giving people the opportunity to incrementally experiment with new behaviours. We create feedback loops to understand how the experiment went and build new beliefs based on the success (or failure) of the experiment. Organisations can then build their values and behaviours out of what does works (bottom-up) rather than what leaders think ought to work (top down). This ties in nicely to Teresa Amabile’s book call ‘The progress principle’ (which builds on Weick’s theory of small wins (Weick, 1984)) Amabile concludes from her research that small actions (nudges) can have a big impact on our beliefs.

Bayesian Change

This feels more like a Bayesian approach to organisational change. Prior knowledge & beliefs (our being) are updated based on emerging evidence from sensory data (our doing). From that we form likelihoods of success that we can do (self-efficacy) which helps to form new (posterior) knowledge and beliefs. In neuroscience this is called the Bayesian brain. A brain that is always in the ‘change’ state because we are constantly projecting our perceptions on sensory data. We are 'grasping at reality’ and if we get if right there is a dopamine reward. Getting it wrong is useful information because we are learning which strategies work and which don’t. There is no state of stability that needs to be unfrozen or refrozen just change.

Bayesian organisational change is fast iterative change.  The lines between beliefs and behaviours become blurred. We find methods or interventions that give us practical outcomes ‘on-the-job’, constantly increasing our awareness about the system and how to change it. Change becomes a set of field trials rather than cause/effect experiments. Change interventions act at the junction between beliefs and behaviours – guided mastery that allows people to navigate through change with scaffolding from their managers and the organisation.

We should dump linear models of change in favour of an integration between diagnostic (behaviour driven - change is a system which can be analysed and measured) and dialogic (belief driven - change is a meaning making systems which are self-organised and emergent).

Using the blob analogy, we use interventions not at ends in themselves to hurry people along the unfreeze, change, refreeze path but a way to make meaning of the culture we are seeking to change. We reflect, affirm, enquire and listen to the feedback and analyse and measure the impact, learning as we go. A true learning organisation.