A little bit of information can go a long way to support change, says Susanne Jacobs
I have recently returned from a wonderful holiday in France. On my travels I stopped at traffic lights for some road works. Nothing particularly unusual, except it was the first time I had come across traffic lights with an LED countdown, displaying the time from red to green.
This simple system gave me certainty as to how long I had to wait and whilst I was not really concerned at my stop – after all I was on holiday and supposedly free from time constraints – I noticed a sense of increased calm with this knowledge. Certainly a very different experience from my hours spent on the M25 in the perpetual traffic jams with no information about why or how long I might remain crawling to my destination.
Without information we face uncertainty and a feeling of lack of control, both of which trigger a threat response in the brain. The need for certainty and control is crucial to intrinsic motivation because, when they are present we feel safe and secure leaving our brains free to think clearly.
Our brains are pattern-matching systems, making sense of the world from our experiences whilst continually assessing whether we are safe or under threat. This environmental assessment is non-conscious and is designed to make split second decisions for action. A hugely beneficial survival process for our ancestors but can lead to unhelpful behaviours in our modern workplaces – particularly during times of change.
Change in itself is of course by default uncertain and thus neurologically threatening. The results from this uncertainty are more often than not, the resistance behaviours I am very often asked how to prevent or manage. After all, over 75 per cent of organisational change initiatives still fail mainly because of the psychological and behavioural challenges that arise.
Whilst there are many tools and techniques to effectively manage us human animals during times of change based on the understanding of our biological makeup, a key tip is to always give as much information as possible (legality dependant of course).
Even if the information is not what people may wish to hear or want, access to information, with time to process, bolsters certainty from which individuals can find control.
We so often shy away from what we have decided is ‘bad news’, fearing reactions, but the more we avoid it the more uncertainty and so threat we place into the organisation. As people try to grasp at certainty they will find their own version of events spreading the stories to willingly listeners also looking for elusive information. Gossip passing through teams can distort the truth which will be far harder to put straight.
Providing certainty in change is a seemingly conflicting approach, but because we know the science we can leverage it. Give the facts, all the facts that you can as soon as possible, give people time to process for their own control with support and then seek to make the changes. Certainty is by no means the only way to support behavioural change but it is a crucial one.