Years before I was a change consultant, I worked at an organisation that went from being run by a team of only four trustees to a publicly listed company. One thing I remember from that significant transformation was the removal of the trustees’ portraits from our meeting rooms to signal a new era in the company’s history. This act of taking away the artefacts of the ‘old culture’ to make way for the new, resonated with me. And then I remembered John Kotter’s final step in his famous 8-step model. A critical component required to anchor the change into the corporate culture is to send the message that the old ways are no longer relevant, acknowledged or rewarded. It helped me appreciate the
Have you ever wondered why we respond negatively to change in some instances, yet bring it on at other times? If we wholeheartedly didn’t like change, would we be the most adaptable species on the planet? Why did we bother to venture out of the trees, walk upright and eventually manipulate many aspects of our natural environment? Yet, we resist the introduction of a new system or organisational restructure at work. The answer, according to neuroscientists, lies in whether we perceive the change or new information as a threat or a reward. Our primal response is to avoid loss or run away from threat, and move towards reward or gain. The threat response triggers the same activity in our brains
Do we really naturally resist change? Now that we know more about our hardwired responses, thanks to recent insights from neuroscience, it’s time to re-think our assumptions that people will always resist change. For what seems like a long time, we’ve assumed resistance as a starting point when devising our change plans and interventions, when in fact, the human response can range from resistance to support. The key is to uncover the range of responses, and why the reactions to the same change can trigger these varied emotional responses. David Rock’s SCARF model eloquently explains the human response to change in terms of loss or gain. Loss equates to threat while gain equates to reward. F
