Just how good is your organisation at change? I’m hoping the answer is “we’re brilliant at it!” but I suspect this probably won’t be the case. I’m going to avoid the usual cliches involving change being the only constant, living in a VUCA world, or being the change you want to see in the world. But I think we can all agree that companies that are good at change survive and thrive. So how do you get good at organisational change?
I might not have all the answers but what I can do is share with you some key concepts from the world of psychology and neuroscience that can improve the success of your change efforts.
It amazes me how often the science is ignored and overlooked when designing change efforts. But the gap between the science and the practice in business is a conversation for another day. Let’s start by getting real –humans are wonderful, messy, complicated creatures, and there are a whole range of factors at play to facilitate change. And they all impact each other. This is why change can be a challenge and why what worked last time might not work next time.
I’m going to start by focusing on the rational arguments and reasons for change. This is certainly where most organisational change efforts begin, with the idea that if we just explain it to them, then change will happen. But giving people the facts is not often enough. If knowledge alone was enough to change behaviour, no one would ever smoke, and we would all have a healthy BMI.
While the rationale is important as a foundation for change, we need more. Which brings me onto emotions. We’re not very good at emotions and feelings at work, but we need to be if we want to get good at change. Clearly attitudes, beliefs, and social norms play a key role in facilitating change. We need to consider how we can help our people have a positive attitude towards the change, and then believe they are capable of the change -something we call self-efficacy in psychology.
And then we need to consider the motivation required to change. We use self-determination theory to help figure out how to increase motivation. In summary if people have autonomy, competence and relatedness, they are more likely to be self-determined and therefore motivated.
And finally before we move on from emotions, we also need to consider what the social norms are in the workplace i.e. what is the done thing around here.
Social norms relate to our innate desire to be a part of the in-group, which in the past has helped us to survive. Does the change we are asking of people contradict the organisational social norms? If the answer is yes, we need to consider how to address this. Our thoughts and feelings play a critical role in facilitating our intention, but here is where it gets really interesting, as organisations rarely consider what is needed to translate our decision into action.
This is where the environment and culture come in. We need to make it easy for people and remove the friction to change. Here we need to consider how to use nudges and micro-habits to facilitate change. For example, asking the general public to remember to bring their bags for life to the supermarket probably wouldn’t have worked, but the nudge of charging 5p for a bag was enough to change the behaviour.
Also focusing on creating habits can help to make behaviour change more sticky. In summary, for change to be successful we need to consider the role of both thoughts and feelings on our decision to change, and then understand how we can best turn that decision into action.
Coming soon I’ll talk about how you can use this science to design and build change efforts that actually work.
If you would like to find out more about how you can use psychology and neuroscience to underpin you change approach we would love to hear from you.
