Understanding Your People: Key to Mitigating Change Management Risks

Conventional thinking says that people hate change, but that’s not actually the case. People resist having change done to them. Without the context that matters to us, our brains default to interpreting change as a threat. Threats trigger a powerful internal alarm system that hijacks performance, generating resistance, which often amplifies throughout a team.

Leaders who understand what matters most are able to get strategic. They can communicate more effectively, keeping alarms at bay. This enables teams to partner together and realize the potential and possibility in change. The first step is understanding how to minimize resistance and unleash buy in.

“The only constant is change.”

Sound familiar? Human beings have been uttering some version of that expression for a long, long time. 2,500 years ago, Greek philosopher Heraclitus declared the truth that has only become more salient with the passage of time.

Here’s the challenge: Change isn’t only constant, it’s also hard. That comes as a surprise to no one who’s ever put their hand to the rudder in an attempt to chart a new direction. Stick around any given organization long enough and you’ll watch one change initiative after another struggle up the steep mountain of good intentions. Some fail catastrophically. Others result in a temporary bump in perceived value but quickly regress to the status quo. Still others see marginal success, but only a rare few deliver on the promised goods.

Regardless of the outcome, 100% of all change initiatives consume time, energy and cash. Further, they generally consume more than we anticipate and most ultimately fail to live up to their promise. Why?

Resistance & The Risks to Your Business

So often it’s not about poor project-management (sometimes it is), or whether the initiative was misguided or poorly considered. More often, change fails as a result of the quiet refusal of otherwise well-intentioned people to own and support change. Buy-in, ownership and support are replaced by resistance, causing the change to sputter, stall and often fail.

Is resistance inevitable? Must change always drain our energy reserves and drive resistance or is it possible for change to actually fuel high performance? Is the old adage “People hate change” really a universal truth or is there a more helpful understanding?

“Have you ever instigated a significant change in your personal or professional life?”

We’ve asked that question to countless people in organizations big and small, private and public in the for-profit and non-profit sectors alike, and the resounding answer is “of course.” Career changes, relationship changes, dietary changes, geographical relocations, major educational pivots… All fly in the face of a profoundly untrue adage that people hate change out of turn.

People don’t hate change at all. In fact, we drive change. The deeper truth of the matter is, we resist being changed. Let’s explore why, what we can do about it, and why that’s good news.

The Myth of Neutral Ground

We’re never neutral when change impacts something that matters to us. When change bumps up against our world, we will either embrace, resist or refuse it. More to the point, change that is not driven from within will almost inevitably result in some degree of resistance.

One of the reasons that change so often fuels resistance is because it can generate interference that obscures what matters most to us. The ensuing ambiguity can result in the quiet refusal to adopt or participate in change. Sometimes it can even drive reactive and occasionally destructive forms of resistance.

How The Human Brain Reacts to Change

The human brain developed in a resource-scarce, highly threatening environment, and so it is predisposed to gather and protect all that it deems necessary for our survival. One of the primary ways it does that is by creating maps. Maps of interpersonal relationships. Maps of structures and processes. Maps of alternative options. Maps of reliable pathways to success, and large-scale maps of the big picture. Anything that blurs or threatens to rewrite those maps will be met with resistance.

Reacting to Change: The 5 Components of the Brain’s Alarm System

We have evolved a powerful, multi-sensor alarm system that’s tasked with ensuring our brain’s maps remain stable and intact. When change threatens to alter or obscure one or more of our maps, the security system springs to action and triggers a psychological and physiological alarm that can wreak havoc on performance and change adoption.

The brain’s alarm system is built from 5 essential components, each monitoring to ensure access to what we need:

• The Mapmaker (Entorhinal Cortex): “I’m Lost! – ”When change results in restructured teams or accountabilities, our Mapmaker dials 911 in our brain and we slip into the bunker mentality.
• The Threat Detector (Amygdala): “I’m Unsafe” – When it threatens our sense of safety, the Threat Detector siren gets triggered and we enter into a fight, flight or freeze mode.
• The Automator (Basal Ganglia): “I’m incompetent” – When we introduce new systems and processes that disrupt familiar tasks we can perform on autopilot, we circle the wagons around “the way we do things around here”
• The Risk Assessor (Habenula): “I’m being set up to fail!” – No matter how sweet the potential reward, if our Risk Assessor smells the potential for failure, catastrophe thinking ensues.
• The Meaning Maker (Default Mode Network): “This is meaningless!” – Obscure our understanding of the “why”, and the Meaning Maker will stubbornly refuse to embrace change.

These alarms take on the appearance of binary, black-and-white, all-or-nothing narratives – unhelpful beliefs that diminish or even incapacitate our capacity for nuanced thinking. The very resources we need most in order to navigate change effectively – the ability to listen to and understand others, to see the big picture, to assume positive intent, to think strategically and innovatively, to remain agile and adaptable – become scarce. In their place: resistance.

When an alarm is triggered our fight, flight or freeze response ensues. It’s very difficult to adopt change with an air-raid siren blasting next to our ears. 

Mitigating Change Management Risk is Not One Size Fits All

Successfully partnering for progress in the face of change is never a one size fits all approach. Teams are not made up of just one sort of person. Each person has different values, priorities, needs and goals. What matters most to one may not even factor on the radar of another. A change announcement that triggers a crippling alarm in one team member might absolutely invigorate and excite the person next to them. So, what is a leader to do to mitigate change management risks?

Meaningful partnership means we don’t do change to our people. Neither do we navigate change for our people. We always want to deploy and support change initiatives with our people.

Leaders and managers who identify what matters most to their colleagues can mindfully cultivate the 5C framework (Cohesiveness, Clarity, Choice, Confidence, Coherence) on their teams. They can get strategic and proactive, anticipating where change will bump up against what matters most. They can forecast which alarms are likely to be tripped and form an intelligent, focussed approach to partnering. That enables leaders to step into change conversations as partners, rather than intruders. All of this builds the sort of trust, resilience and adaptability that empowers employees to own change, skillfully ask for what they need along the way, and helps leaders keep change management risks to a minimum.

Helping Your People Embrace Change

Sometimes we choose change, but more often, it chooses us. Not all change is planned. Not all change is expected. Being able to reframe situations moment by moment is essential to maintaining our sense of personal agency in the face of change. As stated earlier, we don’t like being changed. If we find ourselves simply resigning to change, choosing to white knuckle our way through while we put our heads down and wait it out, opportunities will be lost.

Learning to grow the window between the onset of unexpected events and our response allows us to marshal our best stuff to make the most out of the situation. When we can regain the ability to manage our emotions, minimize catastrophic thinking, reach for possibility and then action the next most logical step towards the best possible outcome, opportunities emerge. Change can become an unexpected catalyst for innovation and new opportunities.