Your brain on change: how a personal "oh sh**" moment put poor change management into perspective

(Disclaimer: the risk of too-much-information for this posting his high)

A week ago, I was called for a mammogram follow-up - a take-two, if you will - based on something they saw they wanted to diagnose further.?I had never been to this location before, letting GoogleMaps guide me through the subway, cross the street and down the block, without question of my actual destination.??And as I approached the building, finally looking up from my phone, my stomach dropped in seeing “Cancer Center” on its awning.

“Is this normal? Do all follow-ups happen here?” I thought as I lightning texted some close friends, hubby included.?I checked in, provided my date of birth, and the masked receptionist handed me a piece of paper to “take to the 3rd floor”.

Dutifully, I made my way through the mandatory Covid-temperature checkpoint, sharing the elevator with a wheel-chair bound woman on an IV-drip, and into the 3rd floor waiting room, where bandana-wearing women sat dispersed across the leather sofas, every other seat.?

“Mammo callback from screening with CC3MM1,” the paper read.?My mind began racing:?“this does not look good …”

And so the mental hieroglyphic deciphering began.?“CC = carcino something or another, 3MM = 3 millimeters, 1 = one tumor …” It was as clear as day.?“Doesn’t look good, right?” I texted hubby, looking for confirmation. “Yeah,” the text came back admitting so much. Among the 20 Google searches that ensued within the following 120 seconds were “CC3MM1 cancer code”, “is 3mm breast tumor large”, and “phases of breast cancer 3mm”, my eyes scanning for any rapid-fire insight across the flickering information on my phone’s screen.??A close friend having bravely fought and won this battle was on standby for “anything you need”, with hospital advice at her fingertips.

“Ana Sen-coh-veesee?” the nurse asked. “Should’ve changed my last name a long time ago,” I sighed internally.?After being given the prerequisite gown & locker instructions, I made my way into the testing room, paper in hand, pointing to the damning words on that printout, and asked, “what do these mean?”

“Oh – it’s where you are:?CC = Cancer Center, 3MM = 3rd floor Mammography, and 1 = testing room #1,” replied the technician.

… Right

(Personal situation update to take the edge off the story: so far so good.)

And so here we have a perfect example of where so many impacted by change find themselves – hijacked by their brains … their brains on change.?‘Dating myself here, but it reminds me so much of that 80’s ad of a frying pan:?“This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?”.

Let’s analyze the ingredients that got me into this state and tease out what it means for most employees:

• Surprise?|?The element of surprise catches employees off guard when some change is announced.?Unless disproportionately positive a surprise (by a large ratio), most unexpected events will trigger a threat response, cuing all possible negative outcomes that may be in play – threats to status, certainty, autonomy relatedness or fairness (thank you, David Rock). (In my case, I was surprised by the Cancer Center awning, with zero positive association for me.)
• Cues?|?In no time, triggered by that “threat”,?employees begin paying special attention to signals in the environment:?what is said and unsaid, done and not done, along with cultural signifiers of what’s to come, to either support or refute their hypothesis.?“Should I actually be worried, or not?”?“What can I expect going forward?”?(In my case, the woman in the elevator with the IV drip, the other women in the waiting room having lost their hair from chemotherapy.)?
• Search for confirmation?|?And so people seek to validate whether what they’re seeing or feeling is real or not, whether others around them (especially authority figures and peers of influence) are seeing the same thing by sharing their own perspectives and biases.?Unfortunately, this search for confirmation enrolls others into the same reality, and sets them looking for the same reinforcing cues. (I immediately reached out to believable friends and my hubby, projecting my own interpretation onto them and revving them up to see what I’m seeing, activating their support of me.)
• Vacuum of information?|?All of this put together, against a vacuum of information, begins the downward spiral towards collective anxiety.?Because that vacuum is never filled with positive projections and hypotheses; it can’t be – surprise has already triggered people’s threat modes, scanning continuously for what else buttresses their beliefs.?The vacuum of information is therefore filled with fear, past history, anger, politics and apprehension … a contagion that is difficult to unwind.?

TWO KEY LESSONS, REFRESHED

1. For change practitioners:?timing is everything. Here is the perfect example of why change management needs to be planned upfront and be brought in as early as possible. If initiatives aren’t ready with their communication, leadership role-modeling and ecosystem change plans as soon as that surprise hits employees, you’re already behind the eight ball.??The greater the space between the surprise and the “mitigants”, the deeper the downward spiral can go.?Minimize it, plan for it, and target people’s likely anxieties.?Further, pay attention to how the surprise is delivered and by whom – it matters. (In my case, had the person who called me to confirm my appointment prepped me for where I would go and why, it would have lessened both the surprise and vacuum.)
2. For those going through change:?You see what you expect to see. ?I continue to be in awe of the extent to which our brains are wired to avoid dissonance.?We know, for example, that we only perceive but a small portion of the reality around us.?Much like AI and Machine Learning, our brains are prediction machines, taking shortcuts based on past patterns and filling in the blanks of our reality every second of every day to anticipate the future.?They “create” this reality based on our expectations, which are in turn based on our past experience and subsequent mindsets.?As David Eagleman aptly articulated in The Brain: The Story of You:?“You don’t perceive objects as they are. You perceive them as you are.”

… So …

For the change practitioners among you:?what are you setting your people up for? And what is their likely experience going to be based on your change ecosystem?

For those going through change:?what are the inputs you’re feeding the prediction machine in your head??And what is the fidelity of the reality to which you’re reacting?

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