Managing process change within an organization is often more stressful than the change itself. Psychologists in the fields of child and adult development have made several important discoveries that are helping companies to facilitate the changes. Success depends on persuading hundreds or thousands of groups to change the way they work.
In broad strokes, there are three types of changes that will typically happen within an organization;
- Strategic planning: An organization changes its overall strategy for success
- Organizational transformation: The addition or removal of a major section or practice (which encompasses restructuring operations, new technologies, mergers, major collaborations)
- Natural lifecycle evolution: For example, changing from a highly reactive, entrepreneurial organization to more stable and planned development
"People are afraid of the unknown. You fear an enemy mostly because of what you don't know. You are afraid of what they might do, not what they are doing."
Sylvia Earle
Typically, there is strong resistance to change. People are afraid of the unknown – it's hardwired into our brains to resist.
The Evolutional psychology view
Evolutional psychology teaches us that the computer is a physical system; it functions as a computer with circuits that have evolved to generate behavior that is appropriate to the environmental circumstances. Memetic Selection, postulated by Richard Dawkins in 1976 supposes that we have over time evolved memes (e.g. ideas, rituals, tunes, cultural fads) that are self replicating in large populations to solve the problem of how to transfer information across distance and time. Change would in effect be in conflict with this primal, evolutionary trait.
Behavioral psychology
B.F. Skinner is widely regarded as the father of modern behavioral psychology and is best known for his experiments with rats reinforcing them to run a maze circuit by putting a reward at the center of the maze (positive reinforcement) and punishing rats with an electric shock if they made a wrong turn (negative reinforcement). Similarly, in an organizational setting, unless positive reinforcements (reporting structures, reviewing and setting goals, financial and non-financial reward systems) are consistent with the desired behavior, employees will be less likely to adopt the new behavior consistently. Like Skinner's rats, the effects of positive and negative reinforcement are negated over time. A similar phenomenon often prevents organizations from sustaining the change if reinforcements are not evolved and reestablished from time to time.
Challenging the status quo
Cognative dissonance is the distressing mental state that arises when people find that their beliefs are inconsistent with their actions—agnostic priests would be an extreme example. Festinger observed in the subjects of his experimentation a deep-seated need to eliminate cognitive dissonance by changing either their actions or their beliefs.
The implication of this finding for an organization is that if its people believe in its overall purpose, they will be happy to change their individual behavior to serve that purpose—indeed, they will suffer from cognitive dissonance if they don't. But to feel comfortable about change and to carry it out with enthusiasm, people must understand the role of their actions in the unfolding drama of the company's fortunes and believe that it is worthwhile for them to play a part. It isn't enough to tell employees that they will have to do things differently.
There are four conditions for changing the midset
- Employees see the point of change and agree with it
- Surrounding structures (reward and recognition systems etc..) must not be in conflict with the proposed change
- Must have the proper skills
- See examples of people they respect modeling it actively.
