Of all the challenges leaders face, the most significant is change.
Whether it’s encouraging people to adopt new ways of working, adapting to new technology and different situations, changes to policies or procedures, or facing disruption — change is as crucial as it is inevitable.
Yet change isn’t easy.
While Behaviour Change and Behaviour Based Safety programs are stalwarts of the business world, transformation often occurs at a surface level, taking the form of compliance and lacking the necessary conviction needed to drive and sustain real change over time. Even in health and safety, where the change is intended very much for the benefit of the individual, people still resist.
Why?
On the surface, changing a mind should be simple: present a strong, logical argument, sans emotion and supported by facts. Present it with enough conviction and authority, and any reasonable person will be compelled to come around.
But if stubborn friends, racist relatives and stubborn teammates have taught us anything, it’s that this approach rarely works.
In 2018, 496 years after Ferdinand Magellan’s crew successfully circumnavigated the globe, only 66 per cent of Millennials believe the earth is actually a sphere. Flat Earthers, climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and cultists — it shouldn’t come as any surprise that logic and facts often have little to do with our beliefs.
So why do they persist in the face of demonstrable evidence? Why does the human brain defy logic and fly in the face of reason? And why, when we attempt to present reasoned arguments, do people dig their heels in and fight tooth and nail to defend their existing point of view?
Well, because despite how change may appear to others, it’s rarely spontaneous, and almost never relates to a particular belief, value, attitude or behaviour in isolation. Rather, it’s due to incremental changes that insidiously propagate through our entire belief system.
Our sense of identity is central, built on the foundations of beliefs, values, attitudes and behaviours. These in turn interact with narratives, emotions and experiences. Each aspect influences and reinforces others, leading to an overall shift.
Where typical attempts to change people’s minds fail is in the tendency to focus on one specific aspect in isolation. We try to change the belief, or the value, or the attitude, or the behaviour.
We need to adopt a more comprehensive approach, using effective interventions at multiple levels of the belief system. These can be prioritised based on where we have most influence, using them as catalysts for a deeper commitment to change.
