Month: January 2021

It may not seem like there are many choices when you’re a prisoner, so there shouldn’t be much to learn about change, but there’s more to prison psychology than meets the eye.  What we know about how easily things devolve started in a basement on the Stanford campus in August of 1971.

Power Corrupts

It was a simulation experiment to see what happens when there’s a perception of power.  It was set up by Phillip Zimbardo, and it involved a group of participants randomly split into prisoners and jailers.  The simulation was due to run for two weeks but was aborted after there were concerns for the psychological and physical safety of the participants.

In short, the experiment had jailers becoming progressively more aggressive and prisoners becoming progressively more subversive.  Christina Maslach, Zimbardo’s then-girlfriend and now-wife, persuaded Zimbardo to halt the experiment due to these concerns.  The conclusion that has been taken from the experiment is that power, left uncontrolled, will cause people to behave inhumanely to other humans.  Despite the criticisms of the experiment, there’s still widespread belief that power corrupts.  (See The Lucifer Effect for more on the experiment.)

Inhumane

It was the research of Albert Bandura that may have shone light on the root cause for the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), which may be our ability to disengage our morals.  Bandura’s book, Moral Disengagement, is a guidebook for how to create situations where good people will violate their moral code.  From majorities and authorities to breaking tasks apart, it explains how some things confuse our moral compass and why we should design solutions to avoid these things.  (See the post, The Necessity of Neurology, for more on majorities and authorities.)

When any group of people is identified as being non-human, the rules of humanity and morality break down.  As a result, the first step to breaking down the moral moorings is to make people no longer people but instead animals – or, better yet, vermin, as was done in the SPE.

Respecting Change

For change managers, this means clear guidance to ensure that even the most vehement detractor remains human and therefore subject to the same respect that every human deserves by nature of being human.  This can be difficult in the heat of disagreements about change, where logical fallacies creep in and name-calling seems to become the norm.  (See Mastering Logical Fallacies for more.)

The best run prisons are ones where the jailers and the prisoners respect each other and recognize the humanity of the other group.  The prisoners realize that the jailers are doing their job, and the jailers recognize the prisoners as humans who have made a mistake rather than non-human animals.

The Prison of Status Quo

Too many change managers feel like they’ve been jailed by the status quo.  It resists the changes that the change manager feels are critical to the organization’s survival.  For change managers to accomplish their mission, they cannot attempt to overpower or dehumanize the status quo.  It’s formed by people who are trying to do their best and do something that has worked for everyone.

By building relationships that recognize the value that the status quo brings – even if it must be changed – it’s possible to build relationships with everyone in the organization and make them allies on the journey of change instead of devolving into mudslinging and resistance.

If you want to get people’s attention to a change session, mention that you’re going to talk about neuroscience, and you’ve got them.  The problem is that the most powerful and fascinating things that we know about human behavior have nothing to do with what we’ve learned from neuroscience.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Magnets are cool.  Really powerful magnets are really cool.  When you can monitor blood flow by monitoring minute changes in magnetic fields, you’ve got the ability to see inside of people’s heads.  Literally, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) uses electromagnetic fields to create a picture of where blood is flowing in someone’s brain.  Because increased neural activity causes increased blood flow, you know what parts of their brains are in use at any given time.

It’s great technology, and it creates pretty pictures, but from the point of view of the change manager, it doesn’t do much to explain how people are persuaded or how to make your change successful.  For that, we’ve got to look at classic science and explore how people behave.

Asch’s Line

Imagine yourself as a poor college student signing up for a study for a few extra bucks – enough to buy a pizza on Friday night.  You’re invited by Solomon Asch to a study of perception.  You won’t be injected with anything.  There are no tests to fill out.  You just need to sit in a room and answer some questions about the length of lines.

These aren’t optical illusions.  You and a few others you don’t know are shown one line on one card and are asked which of the several lines on the second card are the same length.  It’s easy enough that you should get 100% on this test, and you silently wish your calculus test could be this easy.  However, somewhere along the line, it takes a turn.

Some of the others start indicating a different line than the one you think is a match.  When it was just one other person, you brush it off and think about what toppings you’ll have on your pizza.  However, when two people give a different answer, you change your answer to theirs, assuming you must be seeing things wrong.  More startling is that next time everyone in the group disagrees with your initial assessment, you blink, and suddenly their answer seems right to you.  No longer are you adjusting your perception to match theirs – it’s done automatically.

The others in the group, you discover later, are collaborators, and the real study was on the impact of group pressure on perception.  You’ve just proved that a lie, repeated often enough, becomes believed no matter how much of a lie it is.  That leads us to the horror of the atrocities carried out by the Nazis and our attempts to discover how it could happen.  (See Nudge for more on Asch’s experiments.)

Milgram’s Shock

It was on campus at Yale where Stanley Milgram ran another study.  This time, he had you join another person in his office.  That’s where you and the other person were told that this would be an experiment about the impact of negative reinforcement on memory.  You’re divided into roles of teacher and learner.  It’s decided that you’ll play the role of the teacher, and you’re instructed how to use the device that will administer shocks to the learner after incorrect answers.  The device, you’re told, can administer harmful – but not fatal – levels of shock to the learner, who is hooked up to the device in a separate room out of sight.  You get a chance to try it out on yourself, and at low settings, it’s painful but tolerable.

The experiment proceeds, and you’re instructed to provide progressively higher levels of shock to the unseen learner.  If you’re like most, even when the learner indicates that they’ve got a heart condition and they’re afraid, you’ll go to the very top of the scale.  The learner was a collaborator of Milgram and was never hooked up to the device or in danger.

The real study is on the obedience to authority, and if you’re like most, you’ll obey authority.  However, there’s a trick: when the same experiment was done off-campus at a nondescript office, almost no one issued the highest levels of shock.

The message from classic psychology is that our obedience to authority is shaped by our perception of that authority.  (See The Lucifer Effect and Moral Disengagement for more on Milgram’s experiments.)

Shifting Perceptions

Two key learnings from classic psychological research leads to a useful understanding about how messages can be believed if they’re repeated enough and how people can do awful things that would seem to violate their values if they’re presented to them with enough authority.  It doesn’t matter which part of their brain was or wasn’t engaged if they saw things differently or were willing to harm others.

Change is often overwhelming for the manager and those stakeholders who are impacted.  However, a change is rarely the sole source of these overwhelming feelings.  More frequently, it’s the large set of changes that are necessary to reach the desired goal and the feeling that they all must be handled now.  The trick is to find the keystone changes that provides a firm anchor for the changes necessary to reach the objective and accomplish those changes before pursuing the next set of changes that will move us forward to the desired state.

Bad Habits Travel in Packs

The unfortunate news from addiction recovery is that bad habits like smoking, drinking, and poor eating tend to travel in packs.  That is, one of these habits tends to drive the others.  These influences flow in every direction, and they form a network of behaviors that tend to keep people trapped.  Organizations have similar sets of interlocking activities, processes, and sub-cultures that tend to hold the status quo in place.

When identifying keystone changes, it’s essential to identify which of the changes that need to be made can be made relatively independently of other changes.  It’s only by identifying which changes must be accomplished together and which changes may be accomplished relatively independently can we hope to untangle the ball of change into packages that can be tackled without becoming overwhelmed.  Finding a small set of changes that can immediately return value is key to getting the change process rolling.

Creating Slack

To create change requires effort, and expending the effort requires available capacity.  One of the keys to locating the keystone changes that need to happen first is to evaluate whether making the changes will allow you to save resources immediately and therefore reinvest those resources or whether the change is necessary but will only return on the investment after a long time.

Keystone changes make an immediate – or at least short-term – positive impact.  They free resources toward other larger aspects of the roadmap towards the desired state.  This positive impact helps to provide the energy necessary to sustain and accelerate the change.  If you don’t find changes that provide immediate impact, you may find that your change project runs out of steam before it reaches the desired goal.

Breaking Big Changes

While habits may travel in packs, and therefore you may need to accomplish several changes simultaneously, it’s equally important to decompose big steps into smaller steps.  For instance, you may need to improve the employee onboarding and offboarding processes to make the personnel management less burdensome.  While these processes are inextricably linked, they don’t have to be addressed at the same time.  If you see the word “and,” you should ask the question whether both need to be done.

Similarly, onboarding is a big process involving human resources, payroll, information technology, and facilities.  The keystone change may be changing the human resources aspects of the onboarding process – perhaps getting to a centralized human resource information system or at least getting to a unique employee ID number.  The next step might be to automate their provisioning in payroll, information technology, and facilities.  However, it can be that just managing the human resources aspects provides enough slack to keep things moving forward without anyone feeling overwhelmed.

Easier Said Than Done

In truth, it’s easier to say that you’ll identify the relationships between tasks and break them down into small, achievable changes than it is to do them.  However, if you can find those tasks which can be successfully completed without getting tangled by other changes that haven’t been made yet and provide immediate value, you’re on the way to laying down the keystone changes and, ultimately, to change success.

Any musician knows it’s the rhythm provided by the bass that holds the music together.  Whether it’s the electric bass providing a resonating reminder of the tempo the musicians share or, more commonly, the big bass drum pounding out the sounds that synchronize, music is held together by a tempo communicated through the bass.  In your change projects, you’ll need to find your own tempo for the project and your own tempo for communicating the change.

The Tempo of Change

Sounds don’t have one tempo.  Some are fast and some are slow, but all have their speed, which provides energy.  In change projects, the tempo is shaped by the size of the project – with larger projects generally requiring a slower pace and smaller ones being able to move more quickly.  The tempo is also shaped by the urgency of the change.  The more urgent the change is perceived to be, the more quickly the change must progress.

This master tempo of change drives the tempo of communication, just like the drum drives the speed at which the guitarist and pianist play.

The Tempo of Communication

The bass drum doesn’t play on every note or every beat.  It plays rhythmically to remind everyone the time.  Constant bass drum may work for a while – particularly when you want to drive energy into a song – but it quickly becomes tiring.  When planning the tempo of communications for a change, it’s important to first assess the intended tempo of the change and match the tempo of the communications you send to that tempo.  By matching the tempo of communications to the tempo of the change, you’ll begin to shape how others feel about the change – and hopefully get them swept up in the change itself.

Sometimes drummers and bassists intentionally lead or lag the existing tempo.  That is, they recognize the need for the music to speed up.  Perhaps it doesn’t feel like it’s got enough energy, so they push the tempo a bit to get to something that feels better.  Similarly, they can lag a bit to slow things down when it feels like everyone needs a break or the music is going too fast for everyone to stay together.

We can use our change communications in a similar way.  If we want to amp up the energy and the tempo of the change, we increase the frequency of the communications we send.  If we need to slow things down a bit to let everyone catch their breath, we intentionally pause or slow the bass line to give everyone a breather.

The Communication Kick Drum

A common challenge when considering your communications for a change project is how the work will get done.  With so many things going on in the change, how will you write all the content that’s needed?  The answer is to create some anchor content ahead of time and fill in with things as they’re happening.  Musicians know what the bass line will be, what the tempo will be, and what the key notes will be.  You can do the same.

While not all content can be pre-created, a lot of content can.  The kinds of content that get people excited about what they’ll be able to do, why we need to make the change, the vision of the future, etc., are all pieces that can be built and scheduled to go out on a regular basis.

While there is undoubtedly content that will need to be customized to the time and crafted right before it’s sent, you can get a head start by preparing content ahead of time and doling it out at an appropriate time.

Practice What You Preach

For us, we have built communications guides that are short and can be sent out to everyone regardless of where we are in the project (https://confidentchangemanagement.com/ccm/product/communication-tips/).  For our Microsoft 365 projects, we have engagement videos that are designed to show them what’s possible with the platform (https://www.sharepointshepherd.com/engage/).  We therefore have a library of resources we can pull from to create weekly, semi-weekly, or monthly communications.  This dramatically reduces the amount of content we need to create and allows us to keep the beat going even when we’re faced with a seemingly overwhelming amount of work.

More broadly, while there’s a blog post a week, we don’t write them right before they post.  We put them in a queue, and we pull them out one at a time so that you get a consistent rhythm to this blog – just like you would want in a change project.