Fear, Pain and Business Change

Change is not a happy experience for many of us. Whether it’s changing a personal habit, a professional belief or a business change that impacts our thinking about our markets and products – we resist change. Even when change is obviously a good idea.

So many of my turnaround clients needed business change. With change, they wouldn’t have been turnarounds. Yes, there were changes; layoffs, reorgs, less people doing more, less free food, smaller spaces and other fear-driven reduction programs. But the changes that would have resulted in longer term, growth differences, in terms of business models, market focus, value delivery and sales and product strategies, were not in the mix.

The dynamics of troubled companies and their change avoidance are one of the reasons  I became interested in neuroscience. Why not change in the face of ultimate disaster?  Today, I’m beginning to understand.

Your Mind’s Directive: Avoid Threats

Our unconscious mind creates habits and patterns to make it’s work easier. These habits and patterns are moved into an auto-responder in our brains called the basal ganglia. From driving a car to typing on a computer to the route you take to the baseball game – habits are stored in our autoresponder. That leaves more available cycles for our minds to process all the information it’s receiving from the world around us.

Our minds also create business habits in thinking and behavior. These habits include expectations about what can and should happen, how things should behave in the world around us and the processes, responsibilities and thinking that instill our business cultures.

When our unconscious mind senses a delta between what is expected and what is actually occurring, it sends out an error alert. This alert happens in an area of the mind that is connected to the amygdala, where our fear instincts and responses are stored.  This error triggers our fear instincts, we see a threat in the change and so we move away.  The error response is so strong that it causes physiological discomfort.

We hang onto whats safe and known, shutting down our ability to see new opportunities, to adapt to our changing markets.  We get stuck in what’s known as the Status Quo Bias.  And that’s when change and/or innovation comes to a grinding halt.

Stepping Into Change

As leaders we can use the knowledge of our human minds to lead successful change. First, we have to realize that traditional leadership paradigms such as the stick and the carrot won’t work. Threatening someone with the “change or else,” approach only serves to increase the threat response and trigger status quo bias. Incenting people to change in the face of the mind’s error message doesn’t work either.

So how do we lead successful change in our business and our lives?  We’ll talk about that on Friday.

In the meantime, here’s some homework:)

Think back to a change in your history that was difficult. How was that change introduced to you and/or the team/organization? Who was involved in driving that change? What was the motivation/reason for the change that was presented to you and the organization? Did leaders/others explain the problems requiring the change? Did they explain the benefits for all on the other side of the change?

Now think back to a change that was straightforward, even exciting. Ask yourself the same questions…

See you on Friday!