Eternal tango: Change and Resistance to Change I

On Itchy Feet and Change Mindset – and How We Got There by Crossing a Desert

“Change is good for you! Change is what has made a human out of you, the crown of the evolution! Without change you would have remained a spineless amoeba. And this is why you must embrace change wherever you see it”. Albeit a bit exaggerated and a tad melodramatic, you might have heard a version of this narrative before. There is an organisational transformation underway, and you are reminded to swiftly get happy about it as any other attitude would be a blasphemy and abomination against all possible gods and especially the Evolution itself. At the same time, it will hardly go unnoticed that the absolute majority of any large organisation will be cautious if not outright against the upcoming change initiative that is promised to revolutionize the business. Is the idea “that change is good for you” wrong? No, not as such – but it is a big simplification. The point of the following series of entries is not to argue with the validity of the “change is good”-notion and most certainly not to question the evolution. Rather, it is to talk about all possible “W h”-questions. Why is change often perceived in a negative way? Where does the resistance to change take its roots and what is its value? Why is it so crucial to give time and space to negative sentiments around the change? Once we have addressed these questions, we will look closer at how you might work constructively with these sentiments and with resistance in your role as a change leader.

But first off, let us take a quick trip through time and visit our great-great…-great grandparents, shall we? We are somewhere between 150.000 and 300.000 years ago, and the human species had already left its fins behind a while back and is starting to populate the Earth. Imagine a settlement somewhere at a particular swamp. Life here could be unpleasant and uncomfortable, but the community manages to survive. At the same time, there would be rumours about some lake in a neighbouring forest, where one could settle down and enjoy a mosquito-free life and beautiful sunsets. The good old “the grass is always greener” story, some would say. There would be one catch, though: to get there, one would have to leave the settlement behind, walk a couple of days through the forest full of snakes and, most importantly, cross the desert, where one would be a very easy prey to all sorts of wild animals. So, here we are, at a very early version of the loss aversion hypothesis, formulated somewhat recently by Nobel-Prize winner Daniel Kahnemann together with Amos Tversky. When faced with the choice between maximising potential gain and avoiding potential pain, we have a strong bias toward the latter.

As such, not embarking on this journey would at least let you preserve your swampy status quo, whilst doing so could potentially cost you your life, or at least a limb. Hence, the most sensible and safe thing to do would be to do exactly nothing and stay put where you are. If staying at the said swamp was somehow tolerable, ultimately there would be two groups there – one that would be for and one that would be against the “crossing the desert project”. The more risk averse group would stay, the other one - would take off and, unfortunately for the risk-takers, the survival rates between the two populations would be quite different. Thus, while the curiosity and openness to change and eagerness to try something new were all contributing to  the development and evolution, it is exactly this resistance which was once upon a time so crucial for the survival.

Now, take the net survival results of those early days expeditions, iterate 3000 times for the generations at least between now and 100.000 years ago, account for the law of compound interest - and here we go, this type of “programming and hard-wiring” is nowadays much more predominant and wide-spread than the “itchy-feet syndrome”. This is more than just a thought experiment. There is more and more research showing how today’s willingness to take risks and novelty-seeking can indeed be explained by the extent to which the propensity to travel long distance is captured in your DNA. To be precise, “certain dopamine receptor D4 (DRD4) polymorphisms are associated with <…> increased exploratory behavior, novelty seeking, and risk taking, collectively considered novelty-seeking trait (NS)”. And you already see that coming: The “novelty seeking gene variation” is represented much less frequently and varies greatly from nation to nation. This has been further confirmed by various studies, which show that even today humans (and not only humans for that record) are more prone to choosing the safer path of risk and loss aversion. And this is where our fireside story meets today’s organizational life, where the “status quo bias” is much more predominant than “embracing the change wherever you see it".

For in its essence, your IT infrastructure or SharePoint migration project is very similar to your great-great-…-great grandparents quest to move to a faraway forest, where there are no mosquitos, lakes are pristine and every sunset is of such incredible beauty that you want to invent a photo camera.