Tag: managing change

Why We Need to Change

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taking a picture of an old woman on a smartphone

As humans we are constantly adapting to our environment.  But it’s clear from what I’ve said about the brain that changing just one person (ourselves) can be scary and difficult.  So what about if an entire team, organisation or society needs to change?  That means every single person in that group needs to shift.

There’s a vast array of literature on ‘change management’ and a whole industry built on it.  We’re regularly told that between 50 and 75% of organisational change initiatives fail.  The cost of making changes and the cost of failure can be immense. No wonder, then, that companies spend a vast amount of money on change management consultancy (around $10 billion a year according to the Boston Consultancy Group).

So what’s going on?  Why do we have to keep ‘changing’ and how do you decide what needs to change, if anything?

Change is inevitable

Like it or not, our environment is changing all the time. Managers talk about leading in a VUCA world – one that’s Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous – and there’s debate about whether the pace of change is increasing, but it certainly feels that way.  We’ve all seen big changes in our lifetime.

Changes in Technology

Just think about how we listen to music. I grew up with vinyl records, then tapes and Walkmans and Ghetto blasters, then CDs and portable CDs, then mini-disks, now MP3 players, and now it’s on my mobile phone or tablet with wireless headphones. Social media didn’t exist 20 years ago and now it’s ubiquitous.  How did we manage without it?  The rate of technological change seems to be increasing and every time there’s a change, we have to adapt and learn something new.

Changes in Society

We’re living longer.  Improvements in medicine and living conditions mean that half of babies born now will live to be over 100. 

But many companies and governments are still working on a 3-stage life model.  We get educated when we’re young, we work for 45 years, then we retire.  But that’s unsustainable if we’re all living longer.  We can’t afford to retire at 65 if we’re going to live to 100, and we will need to re-skill and shift careers more often.  This is causing tension.

And the makeup of the workforce has changed.  There are more women in work and dual-income couples with children.  For many the Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 model doesn’t work well.  Employees are demanding more flexibility, and a more educated workforce want more meaning in their work lives.

All this has a big influence on how we live and work.  Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott identify we are now shifting into a multi-stage life.  This means more change, more transitions, more breaks, education across the lifespan and more flexibility:

3 stage model of 'education-work-retirement' moving to a multi-stage model
Image from: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-corporate-implications-of-longer-lives/

Changes in Work

Whole industries are being disrupted as new competitors emerge.  Just think about Uber disrupting the taxi industry, or AirBnB disrupting the hotel industry. And AI is threatening to remove jobs currently done by humans. This has knock-on effects with people being pushed out of jobs and having to retrain.

Technological changes allow many of us to work from anywhere, anytime.  The rise of the gig economy has brought flexibility and autonomy for many but also financial insecurity. 

Even in a ‘stable’ career like medicine there is constant change, with a need for re-education and learning as new techniques and medicines appear.

Managing and Leading Change

So the need for change is clear as we have to adapt to the inevitable changes going on in our environment. The human brain is designed for survival – to avoid threats and seek rewards.  And organisations and societies, too, need to constantly adapt in order to survive and thrive.

Managing or leading change in organisations has huge implications for the individuals working in those organisations. Over the next few posts I’ll introduce some tools and models used in managing planned change. But we should always remember that at a basic level, organisations and teams are made up of individual human beings and knowing how individual humans work will make all the difference.

References

Gratton, L. and Scott, A. (2016) The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity, London: Bloomsbury

It’s not fair!

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protest with banners

In previous posts I explained that the brain is geared to seek reward and avoid threat, and the threat response is both stronger and lasts longer.

The amygdala (the part of the brain responsible for initiating the fight-flight-freeze response) is very sensitive and triggered easily.  The trouble is, the brain can’t tell the difference between a genuine life-threatening situation and something more benign.  These days, we’re pretty safe from most natural predators.  But humans evolved to be social creatures and belonging to a group is important to us.  We’re more likely to have the threat response triggered in social situations – being put down in a meeting, for example, or someone offering to give us ‘feedback’.

Fairness

We’re finely attuned to when things are ‘fair’ – if we feel we are being treated differently to other people in the group.  When we perceive things to be unfair, there is a strong reaction in the limbic system.  (And conversely, dopamine is released if we feel something is ‘fair’).  Take a look at this 3-minute video to see how our cousins (monkeys) behave when things aren’t fair:

The monkey was keenly aware he wasn’t being paid the same as the other monkey and reacted accordingly!  So just think how this plays out in organisations.  And you wonder why the gender pay gap makes women angry?

And at times of organisational change, there’s plenty of opportunity for situations to arise that employees may deem as ‘unfair’. Why did that person get the job and not me?  Why am I being laid off or demoted? Why can’t I have the desk next to the window? It’s incredibly important to ensure processes are fair and objective, to explain how decisions were made, and to enable conversations to be had when things are perceived as unfair.

Uncertainty is scary

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binoculars

Our brain is trying to protect us and it likes to be able to predict things.  If it can predict what will happen, it can help us avoid harm. 

Being able to predict things is also efficient – we can make decisions quicker without having to think every situation through. We can do things on autopilot and save mental energy.

In times of uncertainty, our brains cannot predict what will happen and we feel uncomfortable.  Our brain uses energy trying to go through all the possible futures there may be.  The Covid19 pandemic has raised the threat/stress levels for most people, not just because of the real physical dangers, but because of the uncertainty it brings.  Will I still have a job next month?  Can I survive financially? When can things get back to normal?

Studies have shown we feel better having a certain negative future than an uncertain one. For example, a study by Wiggins et al (1992) showed that people with parents who had Huntingdon’s disease, and who therefore might have inherited it themselves, were better off having the test and finding out for sure, one way or the other, rather than live with the uncertainty of not knowing.

And this is one of the main reasons organisational change can be so threatening. When a change is announced our expected future is disrupted, our brains become unable to predict, and this sends us into the threat response.  In times of change you need people to be working at their best, making good decisions and finding the best way forward, but the threat response means their minds are distracted and their thinking is impaired.  Scarlett (2019) describes it like this:

“The adult brain in a threat response is much like that of a teenager – quick to get angry and emotional, hard to reason with.  So an organization going through change is like an organization being run by a group of teenagers.”

Organisations can counter this by creating as much certainty as possible. Give a clear timeline for what you’re planning to do and when, for example, and stick to it.  And make the process quick, to lessen the time people are in this uncertain state.

So if you’re a leader, be empathetic to the problems uncertainty causes for the human brain and do what you can do to create more certainty for those around you.

References

Scarlett, H. (2019) Neuroscience for Organizational Change: An Evidence based Practical Guide to Managing Change, 2nd ed., London: Kogan Page Ltd

Wiggins, S et al (1992) “The psychological consequence of predictive testing for Huntington’s disease”, New England Journal of Medicine, 327 (20), pp 1401–05

Change load and fatigue

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Change can be stressful. While a change may be as good as a rest, our brains can be threatened by the uncertainty, and it takes mental energy to shift habits, unlearn old ways and learn new ways.

How much change is too much?

You may have read or heard something like: ‘moving house is more stressful than divorce’.  This is usually based on research that asks people to rank the stress of various life events.  The best-known is probably the Holmes-Rahe Social Readjustment Rating Scale.  Holmes and Rahe (1967) developed a unit score for a list of 43 stressful life events.  If you add up the scores of all the events you’ve experienced in the previous year, you can predict how likely you’ll become ill from the stress.

Have a go – you can try the Holmes-Rahe Stress Inventory here.

I’ve just done it and I’m over 300, even though I haven’t experienced any of the top stressors!  (And note how even supposedly positive events, like holidays, have an associated readjustment score.)

Although the research can be critiqued, the idea that there is a stress load – that stressful life events on their own may be manageable, but when they come together, the cumulative effect can push us over the edge – is an important one.  Although there will be some changes we can’t control, as individuals we may have more control than we think on the timing of some of these events.  You might choose to avoid or delay changing job if you’ve just had a child, for example. 

And of course, this has implications for change events in organisations too.  A lot of the changes they impose on their employees are choices (upgrade of IT systems, moving offices, restructuring and downsizing etc) and therefore the timing can be adjusted.  So if you’re going through something exceptional like the Covid19 pandemic, which is causing widespread disruption for everybody, you have to stop and think:  is now really the right time to insist everyone change their passwords? 

It might be something really small that finally pushes people over the edge…

See the next post for more on this idea.

References:

Holmes, T.H. and Rahe, R.H., “The Social Readjustment Rating Scale“, Journal of Psychosomatic Research, Vol 11, Issue 2, August 1967, pp 213-218.

Managing Change

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I teach a module on ‘Managing Change’ at a local university.  I talk about the issues of dealing with change at the individual, team and organisation level. Over the past few months, the Covid19 pandemic has imposed radical changes on all of us:  we’ve had to quickly adapt to new ways of working and living, workloads have massively increased or decreased, and the uncertainty and fear are increasing stress and anxiety levels.

Knowing about change doesn’t necessarily mean I can handle it any better that others, and I’ve certainly had my ups and downs.  But the knowledge does allow me to look back and explain what’s happening, both in myself and in the organisation I’m working in, and perhaps be a bit kinder on myself when I realise that these reactions are perfectly normal and human. 

And it also gives me a good understanding of what’s helpful and what’s not when it comes to working with and managing people in organisations going through change.  I’ve observed people in leadership positions follow best practice and do things really well.  I’ve also seen people show a lack of understanding and empathy, leading to really poor behaviour, making the situation even more difficult and stressful for others.

I find myself getting frustrated.  I really wish more people knew some of this stuff and could put it into practice!  So in the spirit of getting better people managers – those who understand how humans work when going through change – I’m going to write a series of blog posts covering some of the key ideas, research, tools and models that I cover in the module and that might be useful in these times.

Stay safe.