Solutions to complicated social problems will almost always meet resistance. For example, getting a population double vaccinated is a fascinating case study, and it teaches us about the psychology of resistance.
Without getting into the politics of vaccination, I am reassured by one thing. People’s varied behaviours during pandemics repeat throughout history. Knowing both history and our weird and wonderful responses to stressors helps us plan for future changes.
Learning from complicated social problems helps us with smaller issues. Could delivering change in organisations be a microcosm of these big social problems?
Delivering change in organisations is almost always going to be difficult. Asking the right questions and positioning a change is crucial. Getting change deliverables out the door to employees is hard enough. What happens when you then find pockets of employees who resist or don’t understand your change?
Could it be that a great degree of this resistance is due to human nature? Can a strong understanding of people’s quirks provide a lens for planning change? Organisational change management is undergoing a renaissance. We are moving from:
1. No deliberate Change Management; doing change to people (instead of with people);
3. Enterprise-wide views of change;
4. Engaging with data to greater degrees;
5. Crafting more human-centric approaches to change;
6. Using behavioural design to ethically “nudge” people towards a desired outcome.
Behavioural economics (BE) is an emerging discipline drawing from many fields, including economics and neuroscience. Major BE concepts help you by providing a new lens to a timeless problem: influencing people. Or — less nicely put — accounting for people’s irrationality and biases when designing change initiatives.
Here is one primary concept which may partially explain why so many people appear to resist change:
People have two ways of thinking:
- System One thinking (rapid, intuitive)
- System Two thinking (deliberate, slower, logical)
We spend most of our day using System One thinking — I tend to call it “autopilot”. System Two thinking is more challenging work — it relies on our internal lawyer or engineer. This type of thinking is deliberate, exacting and short-lived.
Morten Munster is a behavioural designer — with a clever take on why change initiatives fail. His book, I’m afraid Debbie from marketing has left for the day: how to use behavioural design to create change in the real world shares this take.
When designing organisational change, we might use abstract or high-level concepts to convey our main ideas. Munster shares relatable stories of leading executives communicating high-level concepts in spearheading change. Mission statements, visions or terms like “customer-centricity”. Each may sound plausible if an executive fleshes out the detail. Even so, they may be speaking to a captive audience who may or may not use their system of thinking to absorb complex and abstract concepts.
What about the team member on the floor? Munster gives a great example of a 20-year-old working in hospitality. They turn up to their shift hungover and dehydrated. They are happy to be at work and make a slight difference in their small sphere of influence. Yet they wouldn’t have the foggiest about ideas like “customer-centricity”. Why would they? Why would they need to spend unnecessary mental effort in translating what these abstract concepts mean to them?
Could it be that our change plans and communications need that precious System Two thinking? Could it be that the people we need to influence — employees or customers — cannot or will not use system two thinking to absorb our message? This inability to engage system two thinking it will doesn’t make us bad people.
Perhaps we are the lazy ones. As change agents, do we assume an important thing about people impacted by our change? Munster said it well:
“We communicate to stakeholders based on the premise that their system two thinking processes are fully charged.”
Two professions come to mind for their System Two thinking. Judges and Airline Pilots. Both revered for sober judgement and life-altering consequences.
Evidence suggests that even judges may switch off their system two thinking depending on the time of day. Yes, their judgements are based on legal doctrine and other logical constraints. Yet could being hungry or tired influence their decisions? This simple factor shapes many prisoners’ sentences.
What’s the most common cause of aviation accidents? Pilot error. Pilot applicants undergo an intense battery of psychometric tests during recruitment. Yet, they still may make incorrect decisions as experienced pilots. Fatigue, distraction and mental overload each play a role. System two thinking is finite. The auto-pilot (pardon the pun) of System One thinking is about conserving mental energy by using shortcuts. Thus System One thinking is fraught with biases.
So what does this mean for anyone leading change or marketing a product or service?
Think of someone impacted by your change initiative. It may be the proverbial 20-year-old, hungover food-service team member. They either can’t or won’t understand abstract concepts like “customer first”. Instead, they may be after concrete behaviours they can use immediately in their shift. What is a perfect example of this? At Starbucks, instead of useless slogans and abstract concepts, they designed a customer service model. They called it LATTE — a rather apt name.
Listen to the customer
Acknowledge the problem/situation
Take action and solve the problem
Thank the customer
Explain what you did
- Jonathan Rodriguez, Trainingcentre.acgov.org
These specific behaviours are quickly learned and demonstrated by our 20-year-old team member. They can still be in System One thinking mode throughout their shift yet understand and perform these behaviours. Think of all the money wasted over countless change initiatives, where failure may have been due to one thing:
Assuming System Two (deliberate) change communications works on employees, who are getting through their day using System One (automatic) thinking.
Now, going back to your change initiative — does your messaging have clear calls to action? Is it obvious what recipients need to know or do?
People impacted by your change working different contexts. For example, some people may work in factories while others work in various offices. They may engage with your future change in different ways. Do you understand their context? Have you adapted your message and communication mediums accordingly?
If you are on autopilot — using a System One/”one size fits all” style to your change communications — are you missing out on a sincere opportunity to influence your readers?
The easier it is to communicate to a lot of people through a particular medium, the worse that medium is a changing behaviour. Mass communication is very efficient at informing through posters, intranet and banner ads, but it is inefficient at changing behaviour.
Morten Munster, “I’m afraid Debbie from marketing has left for the day”, pg. 57
People respond to messages requiring little mental effort on their part — especially when the action is easy to perform.
Your target audience is not likely to examine (or care about) your change. Well, not as much as you and others on your project. They might use mental shortcuts to process your communications, what they need to do and what your change means for them.
Preview the first chapter of my book — The Change Manager’s Companion.
My book — The Change Manager’s Companion — is available now.
Want to learn organisational change management techniques in less than two hours? Check out my online course on Change Management.