Many organizations have difficulty changing even when change is crucial. In an academic article by Polites and Karahana entitled “Shackled to the Status Quo”, the scholars explain how individuals fear organizational changes because of the potential negative effects of those changes on them. Job losses that result from productivity improvements, and changes to organizational power, were among the top fears. They discuss that employee inertia is emotional and can lead to irrational justification of excuses to cling to existing processes and technology, which can result in negative ramifications for the organization. Decisions regarding change should be closely monitored by management to ensure that organizations are not stagnated by employee fears.
Having spent 30 years working on the vendor side of technology, I have witnessed first-hand the extent to which employees will go to avoid technology change. Employees justify to themselves that change is unnecessary, even dangerous to “security” (a favorite red herring) to convince their management to maintain the status quo.
The Rational and Emotional Reasons to Change
In their book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, Chip and Dan Heath further elaborate on resistance to change. Many of the issues associated with change stem from emotional concerns and a lack of clarity on how to facilitate the change.
The Heaths acknowledge that there are three important aspects to change. There is the rational side, which says it makes sense to change; to save money, save time, etc. There are also the emotional reasons to change; to make our customers happier, to save lives, save the environment, etc. Once we have appealed to both sides, we need a roadmap for the change; step one, step two, etc.
For the first two aspects, the authors use a metaphor of a rider on an elephant. The rider represents the rational side. The rider provides planning and direction but can get bogged down in analytics and overthinking. The elephant represents the emotional side. The elephant is energetic, passionate, and motivated but has little willpower and can be fearful. For change to happen the elephant and the rider must be in harmony. Once the rider and the elephant are aligned, change requires clear directions, not high-level goals. “We want to save 100,000 lives in 365 days by elevating the beds of patients on ventilators” vs “We want to save lives”.
Here are three surprising facts about change:
- Some problems are situational rather than individual – with a small change to an individual’s environment, change might be much easier. Helping employees become healthier and reducing insurance premiums by changing to healthy snacks in the vending machine, for example, or providing free healthy meals in the cafeteria.
- What looks like laziness might be exhaustion – change often requires abandoning automated behavior (taking a shower, making your morning coffee, driving to work) when automated behavior changes to something that we have to think about, the “rider” part of us (who is providing the new directions) becomes exhausted. When employees have to pay attention all the time to a new process and that can be exhausting.
- What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity – what exactly needs to be done, where and when? This clarity allows the brain to establish new (healthier, safer, cheaper) habits that create a new normal. For example, when you go to the grocery store to buy 1% milk instead of whole milk.
The rider/elephant metaphor is important because our rational side (the rider) is often dwarfed by our emotional side (the elephant). How much control does that tiny rider have over that huge elephant? That is how much influence you have using logic alone to convince fearful individuals to change their behavior. Change must be approached with alignment between reason and emotion along with instructional clarity.
Applying the Concepts of the Rider and the Elephant
There is a great example in Switch where a finance executive is trying to convince his peers that a new purchasing system/process is needed. While the rational side of the equation involved savings of close to $1B over five years, he knew that wouldn’t be enough to convince his peers to consolidate negotiating and buying into a central function. So, he sent a summer intern to investigate a single item that the company was using: work gloves.
The intern’s investigation yielded over 424 different versions of work gloves procured, with prices ranging from $3-$17. Instead of just putting all this “data” into a spreadsheet, he had the intern assemble a pile of gloves with prices pinned to each sample in a headquarters conference room. When the executives gathered for the meeting, they were stunned by the “glove shrine”. They couldn’t believe the organizational inefficiency associated with 424 individually procured work gloves, not to mention the cost savings! The “glove shrine” was taken on tour to demonstrate to others in the company that central purchasing made sense. The emotional impact made the decision to move to a central purchasing system much easier. You can imagine how difficult it would be to argue with the decision (especially if you are the division paying $17 for a pair of gloves).
Hitting Home
My husband and I have recently been presented with a serious health situation. My husband was diagnosed with Colorectal Cancer in September. Good nutrition and a healthy lifestyle will mean the difference between life and death according to the latest academic studies. The rational side of this necessary change is exhausting as we constantly consider whether this food is better than that one and how much exercise is enough. Our “riders” have spent a lot of time spinning around in circles. The change became much easier though as we consider the emotional side of the equation. We don’t have a choice. The critical importance of change has motivated and energized the “elephants” in us to do what we need to do. In addition, there have been several specific things/directions that have helped us zero in on what to do first. While change is never easy, our riders are steering us toward a healthier path and our elephants are charging forward. Wish us luck!
