I remember drinking from a garden hose growing up. Come to think of it most of my hydration in the summer came out of an external water device. The average pressure of your garden is around 40-50 PSI. Have you ever drank water from a firehose? The pressure of a firehose is 100-300 PSI and can pump up to 1,000 gallons per minute, capable of knocking over people or cars.
How many people have been knocked over by the sheer volume and pressure of change at work? In this edition we will deep dive into what we know about people and change, and what we can do to manage and maybe even embrace it.
“The only constant is change”.
This little beauty of a quote comes from Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher from the late 6th century. This was a time people where critically thinking about things. Heraclitus challenged his peers of the day with an ongoing process governed by a law of change. This not only looked at the physical law of nature but also how change manifests itself in humans.
So, what do we know about how people react with anything new?
We all have cognitive biases which are basically mental shortcuts that are designed to help us survive in the wild. Here are some ways how people deal with change:
- Status Quo Bias – People often resist change because they like what they are familiar with. They may be fearful of what they will lose with change.
- Confirmation bias – People tend to pay attention to things that confirm what they already know (or believe) to be true. They ignore or reject information that goes against their beliefs – which may cause them to argue against any kind of change.
Volume of Change:
We live in a complex world and as humans we are “firehosed” with an unprecedented volume of information and change. Our brain simply cannot process or focus on all of it. “The human brain has a built-in limit on the number of discrete thoughts it can entertain at one time. The limit for most individuals is four,” according to the research team led by University of Oregon psychology professors Edward Awh and Edward Vogel.
The result? The executive functioning part of your brain gets exhausted and good people can behave poorly. Leaders pushing change down to their teams and their teams resisting and pushing back.
Practical Application: Strategies and Tools
Change does not have to be perfect; it just needs to be less messy. Here are a few change management practices you can act on right now on one of your change initiatives to improve desired results.
1. Prioritize the number of initiatives your team is facing.
· People need to perform at a high level in their day job.
· Push back on timing of different initiatives – it is not that you won’t comply, it is a matter of when and prioritizing of what.
2. Involve your people in, if not what, then the how.
· Change is a human centred thing – involve people around what/how it should be implemented – involve early and often.
3. Share “the why” in the change. Don’t sell, Tell!
· If you give your people enough quality information and facts, they unusually will come to the same conclusion as you have.
4. Create new habits by hardwiring them to an existing habit your people have.
· Lean into status quo bias, make it as comfortable and similar to what people are presently doing.
Key Tool – I partner with ExperientPoint, a company in Toronto on their ExperienceChange change simulation. This is a fantastic way to have leaders and their teams learn change management through an interactive experience – learning needs to be informative and fun. Let me know if you would like more information.
What other change tips do you practice in your organization? Share in comment section or connect with me and I will share your add in part 2 of change next week.
“Humans Can Only Think About Four Things at Once.” InformationWeek, UBM Technology Group, www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/humans-can-only-think-about-four-things-at-once.